Windwalker, Part 3: Zephyrus
by Teutonic Titwillow
Summary: Undrentide has fallen. Rebecca Blumenthal has turned her back on her old life and embraced her new life as a vagabond priestess of Shaundakul and bad-tempered do-gooder. But, as shadows pool in Waterdeep's streets, she finds out that you can never really escape your own past - and that while she may be done with heroism, heroism isn't done with her. (HotU with...twists.)
1. (re)Wind

_A/N: So, I've been going through a lot of stuff, but this summer I decided it was past time to sit down and finally get this story finished and out of my head. Here it is – the last story in the Windwalker trilogy, and Rebecca's biggest adventure yet. The basics of the plotline might be familiar to a lot of people, but I've added my own twists and taken a few liberties here and there, so hopefully there are a few surprises in store for you._

 _As with the first two in the series, I've done my best to research 3.5e rules on spells and character classes and stick to them, but I hate reading FR stories where I can hear the dice rattling in the background, so I'm not going to adhere that tightly to mechanics when I don't feel it really adds anything to the story._

 _To everyone who's been waiting to see what happens next, thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy the ride._

 _To anyone who isn't familiar with Rebecca, I strongly recommend reading the previous two stories. This will make a whole lot more sense if you do._

* * *

"Poseidon massed the clouds, clutched his trident and churned the ocean up; he roused all the blasts of all the Winds and swathed earth and sea alike in clouds; down from the sky rushed the dark. Euros and Notos clashed together, the stormy Zephyros and the sky-born billow-driving Boreas."

\- Homer, "The Odyssey"

* * *

 _Zephyrus – The god of the West Wind. Both the gentlest of the winds and the bringer of sudden storms. The harbinger of spring, the death of winter, and the herald of change. A beginning, and an ending._

* * *

 _"Commandments? What the fuck is wrong with you? Shaundakul doesn't give commands. He just gives unsolicited advice._

 _What, you're still here? You're not gonna go away until I say something pithy, are you? Fine. But this is off the record. That means you're putting down that pen. Quill. Whatever._

 _Ahh. Much better. Thanks. You're a peach. Order a chair and pull up a drink, then, and I'll tell you all about Shaundakul – just between you and me._

 _Let's see. You want commandments? Well, like I said, he doesn't do commandments, but if I had to, I'd narrow the old man's guidelines down to three:_  
 _  
One: Kindness is the universal language._

 _Two: Home is wherever you're standing._  
 _  
And three: Rules are made to be broken."_

\- Rebecca Blumenthal, Windwalker of Shaundakul and Heroine of Undrentide

~*~  
Chapter 1: (re)Wind  
~*~

Invisible, I sat by the roadside and watched the world go by.

It wasn't magic that made me invisible. Not exactly. I had an even bigger tin ear for magic than I had for music, and you'd have to find a bucket big enough to hold the Trackless Sea before _I_ could carry a tune in it.

What I did wasn't real magic, but it was the kind of trick that could probably look like magic if you weren't in on the secret. Call it mundane magic. Call it an everyday illusion. Call it _my_ kind of magic.

You didn't need any special tools to practice my magic. You just had to know a thing or two about people. I cast my spell by sitting down, slouched against a low roadside wall and wrapped head to toe in a ratty old cloak. I didn't move. I could've been sleeping. Hell, I could've been dead.

Then I watched as people walked right on by as if I wasn't even there.

I smiled, a little sadly. The world never changed. Not really. Not even when you changed worlds.

It was market day in Yartar. Wagons rumbled steadily in and out of the western gates. Some spilled onto the Evermoor Way, where they trundled down towards the banks of the Dessarin. More were heading into the city, weighed down with goods for the market. A steady stream of foot travelers weaved around them, hurrying past peevish oxen and snorting draft horses whose breath rose ghost-white from their nostrils in the early morning air.

At my back, the stone was cool. Above me, the sun was warm. Underfoot, blades of new grass were just starting to poke their heads up between the cobbles, green and sweet-smelling.

Spring was coming. I could feel it on the wind.

I tapped one of the tiny green shoots with the tip of my finger. "Relax," I said softly. A tiny thread of power unwound itself from its seat under my heart, creeping up into my throat. "You can come out now." My tongue tingled as the words left it.

Slowly, almost shyly, the blade of grass unfurled, broadening and lengthening until it was tall enough to catch the sunlight. There it nodded, a defiant little streak of green stickin' it to Old Man Winter.

I smiled and settled back against my wall. "There you go," I told the grass. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

The grass swayed at me, but it didn't say anything. Most grass didn't, and if there was any grass that did, I didn't want to be anywhere near it.

Sitting back, I waited.

Every so often someone noticed me there, and a few loose coins tinkled to the ground by my feet. I thought about stopping them and telling them to keep the change, but those kinds of conversations always embarrassed people, and embarrassed people always remembered the ones who'd embarrassed them. Being remembered wasn't what I was there for, so I kept my mouth shut and let the coins fall.

I waited. The day turned towards noon.

After a while, the pile of money grew to a point where it really started to get on my nerves. I glanced down the wall. There was a pile of rags not far off, slumped against the stone much like I was. If you squinted and maybe cocked your head about thirty degrees, the pile almost looked like a person. A tin cup lay on the ground near its feet. There were some coppers in it, maybe a silver piece or two.

I coughed loudly to get the guy's – at least, I was pretty sure it was a guy – attention. Then I pointed to the coins at my feet. "Hey, buddy. You want these?" I offered.

The man's head turned. His beard was grey and scraggly and his skin wasn't far off from being the same color. The overall effect was kind of like seeing a piece of lichen peel itself off of the stone, sprout eyeballs, and look my way. A pair of bleary eyes tried to focus on me. "Don't want to poach on your turf, ma'am," the beggar slurred diffidently.

"It's not my turf." I caught his skeptical stare. "Honest. It's not. I'm just waiting for someone."

He squinted at me uncertainly, his eyebrows squinching together like a pair of fat, fuzzy caterpillars. "Sure'n y'need the coin more than I," he protested.

It was probably a bad sign when even the homeless guys thought you looked seedy. "Nah," I said. "I'm fine. Really." I had what I needed. I didn't want more. More money meant more problems.

The man gave me a doubting look, shook his head, and huddled back into his nest of rags, shivering. There wasn't much of a chill, at least not to me, but then I'd had a hot meal not that long ago. "Don't want to poach on your turf," he repeated stiffly.

I shrugged. "All right," I said. I didn't push it. From his tone, I was starting to step on his pride. He probably didn't have much left to him except for his pride. I wasn't about to take that away, too. "Suit yourself."

I left the money where it was - just in case he changed his mind - and settled back, making myself comfortable again.

Behind me, wood clinked against stone.

I waited.

The morning got warmer and the crowds got thinner. People seemed to lose interest in throwing loose change at me, which was nice. I was getting tired of having pennies bounce off of my shins.

Then, a little before noon, a woman came striding down the Evermoor Way like she owned it.

The woman was platinum-haired, as brawny as a lumberjack, and so tall she could've hunted geese with a rake. A huge fuck-off sword was propped on her shoulder. She paid no mind to the crowd. She didn't have to. The crowd parted for her like the sea before a better class of prophet. People could be a little unobservant sometimes, but on the whole, they weren't stupid. They knew death on two legs when they saw it, and they weren't about to get in its way.

I snatched my hood forward to hide my grin. It looked like my patience was about to pay off.

I waited until my quarry had passed me by. She didn't seem to notice me, which was exactly what I'd been hoping for. I reached behind me, curled my fingers around Silent Partner's haft, and stood to follow her.

The weight of the quarterstaff in my hands made me pause. As always, the wood was as hot as sun-warmed teak in my hands despite all the hours it had spent in the shade, and it buzzed faintly in a way that made me think of a neon light on the fritz. I glanced at the beggar again, and I could almost feel a set of ghostly knuckles rap sharply against my forehead.

 _All right, all right_ , I thought. _I hear ya, Harry._ _Don't get your knickers in a knot._

I knelt and scooped my pile of coins into a spare pouch. As an afterthought, I added a few linen-wrapped travel rations and a few cloudberry candies in a waxed paper packet.

The beggar didn't stir at the sound of my footsteps. I stopped and placed the pouch on the ground near his hand, where hopefully he'd find it before anyone else would and be able to take it without compromising his pride. As an afterthought, I unhooked the clasp of my cloak and swept it off my shoulders and over his. The weather was getting too warm for cloaks, anyway.

Then I stood, turned and walked away.

A breeze flitted by. It brushed my cheek and tugged at my hair, almost playfully. I squinted up at the sky. "Oh, shut up," I muttered. "Who asked you for your opinion, anyway?" With a final little gust that flicked a lock of hair right across my nose, the wind died. I scowled and swept my hair out of my face irritably. A passing courier gave me a wary sideways glance, the kind you give to potential lunatics. I turned my scowl on him. He blinked and hurried away.

I scanned the crowd. I'd lost sight of my target. "Shit on a brick," I growled. A merchant's wagon rumbled past. It was heading in the right direction. Hurriedly, I grabbed hold of the frame as it went by, planted one foot on the rear step, and hauled myself up long enough to peer over the crowd.

There was a merchant's guardswoman perched on the crates in the back of the wagon. On seeing me, her hand went for her sword.

I raised the holy symbol I wore on a chain around my neck. "No worries, captain," I said smoothly. "Just scouting the road ahead. I'll be out of your hair in a second."

The guardswoman's eyes flicked to the symbol. She relaxed and took her hand away from her sword, although her eyebrows stayed upraised in unspoken curiosity. "As you say, Windwalker."

That was another kind of magic. In certain circles, my holy symbol opened more doors than dynamite. Old Windy was a roamer, and people who roamed for a living, like this traveling merchant and the guard whose job it was to protect the caravan from bandits and other dangers of the road, knew he and his followers were on their side.

My eyes raked the crowd until I saw platinum blonde braids. I grinned. "Fair winds and safe travels," I told the guardswoman, and dropped back down to the ground.

My target strode ahead. I stalked behind. The crowd didn't part for me the way it had for her, which was fine by me. I let myself get swallowed up, just another body among many, quietly slipping into someone else's shadow every time it seemed the blonde woman might look my way.

I was almost to her when the sound of urgent hoofbeats rose above the noise of market day traffic. The hoofbeats pounded in time to the chiming of little bells. That sound made me stop, listen, and crane my neck for a glimpse of the horse and its rider. A ripple went through the crowd. People began to fling themselves out of the way of the oncoming horse and rider.

Then I saw him – a white horse all decked out in silver harness and bells, and a rider in silver and blue. He was one of Tymora's couriers, and he was riding like the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels.

I wondered what news the Luckbringer was carrying that was so urgent, but both professional courtesy and basic self-preservation told me to not to get in his way. I stepped aside.

The blonde woman was a little slower to move, maybe because she wasn't used to having to move for other people. The horse blew past her hard enough to make her lose her footing and stumble backwards. "You blind-arse son of a circus whore and a donkey's left ballsack!" she bellowed. She shook her fist after the horse's rapidly retreating ass. "Watch where you go!"

She hadn't noticed me yet, but the crowd was scattered, my cover was blown, and it was only a matter of time.

The time for stealth was over. If I was still going to catch her off guard, I had to do this now and I had to do it fast.

In a few quick steps, I was to her. I grounded the butt of my quarterstaff and braced myself.

Then I reached out and slapped her on the shoulder with the back of my hand. "Hey, Thunderbeast!" I shouted back at her. "You kiss your mom with that mouth?"

Magda Thunderbeast spun her greatsword down from her shoulder and into a guard stance, a move I thought was about as instinctive to her as breathing. Then she actually looked at me. Her jaw dropped. "By all the gods! Little noble!" she boomed, let her sword's point fall, and flung her arms wide.

The next thing I knew, I was being hauled into a pair of burly arms. "It's about bloody time you showed up!" she hollered in my ear. "Tempos' balls, it's good to see you!" She squeezed me a little tighter, this time lifting me clear off my feet. "Where in the Hells have you been, woman? Last I saw hide or hair of you, it was in Daggerford!"

I would have answered, only I had no air left in my lungs. Also, my face was being ground into a combination of a solid inch of boiled brontosaurus hide plus Magda's triple-D's, and while I was sure there were a lot of men and probably some women who'd consider this a great way to die, I wasn't one of them. "Mags," I managed to say. "Leggo." She let go. I staggered a step backwards, wheezing. "Thanks. Jeez. You'd think you hadn't seen me in – wait." I started counting on my fingers. I stopped at five and squinted. "Shit. How long's it been?"

"Hah! Good thing you have Magda Thunderbeast to remember these things, eh?" She clapped a hand onto my shoulder, making my knees buckle. "You left for Daggerford six months ago!" she shouted about six inches from my face, because Magda believed in personal space the way most people believed in UFOs. "I worry for you, little noble! The last time Magda let you leave the Sword Coast without her there to watch you, you pulled down a Netherese city on your head! Where in the world have you been?"

I spared a glance for the crowd. People were starting to look. I was starting to regret giving up my cloak. "Here and there," I said. I tucked Silent Partner into the crook of my arm, the quarterstaff tight against my body. Zalantar wood and mithril were hard to hide, but that didn't mean I couldn't try. "Hey. Keep your voice down, willya?"

Mags rolled her eyes. "Very well," she said. "Be evasive. Have it your way. I will simply have to bring you to a tavern and ply you with drink until your lips loosen." She let her hands drop. "But answer me this, at least: how in the hells did you find me?"

I pulled a solemn face and gestured towards the sky. "Divine inspiration?" I suggested innocently.

The Uthgardt gave me a look that was half disbelieving and half hopeful. "Truly? The Rider of the Winds led you to me?"

I lost the fight to keep my solemn face on. "Nah," I admitted, laughing. "Just kidding. Actually, I just asked around." I punched her shoulder affectionately. "You're pretty hard to miss, Mags."

Mags frowned in momentary disappointment. Then she brightened. "Hah! Perhaps my fame has spread far enough, at that."

I lowered my voice and struck a pose like a wrestling announcer introducing a newcomer to the ring. "Magda Thunderbeast, Scourge of the Black Hand Band," I intoned. "The Bane of Banditry. The Dame of Do-gooding-"

She made a face and returned my punch. "You made that last one up."

I grinned. "Could be." I looked around again. There were too many people here. I used to like crowds, but lately, not so much. "So," I said then, and looped my arm around Magda's. "Speaking of ale, I hear the Blue Boar in Triboar just got a few new kegs of Sleeping Dragon. What say we-"

A voice cut across the crowd. "I say!" it called. "You, there! Are you-"

My heart sank. I let go of Magda's arm and turned.

A dark-haired man was jogging up behind us, waving frantically to catch my attention.

When the guy saw my face, he stopped dead. His eyes went to Silent Partner. Then they went to back to my face, where they bulged slightly. "By all the gods!" the man burst out. "That staff! That armor! That hair! You _are_ she! The Heroine of Undrentide! In the flesh!" He lurched forward and stuck his hand out eagerly. "My friends will never believe this! My lady, may I shake your hand?"

I stared at his outstretched hand. It had been two years. Two fucking years since Undrentide fell and I'd made my way back to the Sword Coast from the Dalelands. I didn't know how long it had taken for that fucking kobold to find a printer willing to stamp his stinking brew of five parts bullshit to one part truth on a page, but it can't have been long, because by the time I got back I found that the news had flown ahead of me and suddenly I couldn't set foot in a crowded tavern or show my face in daylight on a busy street anywhere in the Sword Coast without attracting the kind of attention I'd thought I'd finally gotten rid of when I left my old life behind.

I'd put up with it for a year, but when the snows came again, I left. I'd needed a change of scene anyway, and I'd hoped that if I just stayed away for a while it'd all blow over, like any fad or rumor.

Apparently, I'd misjudged how long a juicy rumor could last in a society which hadn't gotten around to inventing tabloids.

I scowled. "No," I said curtly, and went to tug my hood up to hide my face and hair. Then I realized that I didn't have a hood anymore. My scowl deepened. "Buzz off."

The man frowned. "But-"

"Sorry," I said, my voice as taut and uninviting as a guillotine's blade. "You must have me confused with someone else." Then I turned away and started walking, not waiting for Mags to follow.

"Must I?" the stranger asked, radiating earnest cluelessness. He darted ahead of me, falling into a kind of backwards trot to keep pace once he was there. "I mean, do I? But you look like the picture! You know, the one in chapter twenty-three?" He paused and gave me a good once-over. Then he cleared his throat. "Er. Mostly. Sort of. I admit, in your picture you were more…" Vaguely, he cupped his hands and held them out in front of his chest. "You know. _More_."

I stopped. "That's it," I growled. I lunged forward and grabbed a fistful of the guy's shirt. "Hold still," I ordered, hefting Silent Partner. Then I added, with perfect truth: "Don't worry. This'll hurt you a lot more than it'll hurt me."

A forearm like an iron bar clamped across the front of my shoulders. "Now, now, little noble," Magda chortled. "He means no insult, and if you begin to murder men merely for irritating you, soon we will be all out of men."

"There'd be a few left. Probably," I growled, but relented. The guy had already taken to his heels as soon as I let go of him. "God. I don't even know how people believe that shit."

Magda let go of me. "I think you are overreacting," she said. "You act as if your fame plagues you where e'er you go, but of all the people on this road, how many even noticed you?"

I grimaced. "One, but one's enough."

Magda rolled her eyes. "Why this upsets you so, I will never understand," she said. "When I heard the rumors, I was so proud of my little noble friend I could burst!"

"Yeah, well, watch where you do that, it's hard on the carpets," I muttered. Angrily, I jerked my belt straight again. Apothecary pouches shifted and my belt-knife clinked in its sheath. "And the rumors are just that. Rumors. You know what really happened."

"Yes, and _I_ still name you a hero, and I am always right. So there."

One corner of my lips curled up into a half-smile before I could stop myself. Then I shook my head. "It wasn't some heroic adventure, Mags," I said. "Shit just happened and I reacted to it. Besides, Xanos did most of the work. He should be the hero. Not me." I had to stop and swallow a lump in my throat before going on. As I always did whenever I thought about Xanos, I wondered how he was doing. Probably fine – he was a survivor. I hoped so. I couldn't know for sure. I'd never been brave enough to track him down and find out exactly how deeply I'd hurt him by ditching him the way I had. "Besides," I added. "I can't let people start thinking I'm a hero. Then I'll have to spend all my time rescuing kittens out of trees or some shit."

Magda patted my back, but she didn't belabor her point. "Do you know what I think?" she asked.

My voice was still grumpy. "What?"

"I think you need that drink." She slipped her arm through mine. "Come! Let us to Triboar, where we shall slay sleeping dragons in their kegs!"

I relaxed. Mags had been one of my first friends in Faerun. It really was good to see her again. "To Triboar," I agreed, hugging her arm to my side.

Arm in arm, my friend and I set off down the road.

The white gravel typical of northland roads crunched underfoot. The smell of the northern Sword Coast – blueleaf and larch, loam and oak, juniper and sweetgrass, with the faint salt tang of the Sea of Swords overlaying it all even here – reached my nose. I drew in a deep breath and let the familiar scents calm me. On either side of me, rolling fields and low drystone walls ran along the road, and further on, I saw tangled forests and rugged farm valleys that looked at once familiar and strange.

At last, I looked up at the sky. It was blue and vast and full of…possibility.

I let out my breath, slowly.

 _Well_ , I thought. _I'm back_.


	2. Smoke

_Death arrives among all that sound  
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,  
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no  
finger in it,  
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no  
throat.  
Nevertheless its steps can be heard  
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree._

\- Pablo Neruda, "Only Death"

~*~  
Chapter 2: Smoke  
~*~

Somewhere around halfway to Triboar, I stepped around a particularly muddy set of wagon tracks.

Then I stopped.

All the other tracks we'd crossed followed the road, but these had veered, carving a deep gouge in the gravel and dirt.

I looked up, following the line of the tracks with my eyes. This stretch of road was lined with thickets and a growth of trees not quite dense enough to be called a forest. Most of the thicket was unbroken, but there was a gap in it where the tracks went in.

I moved closer. Broken-off branches flanked the gap in the thicket. Underfoot, more broken branches had been trampled into the dirt.

I caught a flash of color out of the corner of my eye, and turned. A piece of pale fabric fluttered, caught on a branch. I reached out and pulled it off, then held it in my hand, rubbing my thumb over its face. Dried blood flaked off under my thumb.

Magda pushed past me. "Rebecca," she said. All lightness had gone out of her voice. She pointed up. My eyes followed her gesture. A thin plume of smoke was rising a little ways off the road.

I dropped the cloth. "Shit," I said. I shifted my grip on Silent Partner.

Mags drew her sword. "Aye," she said, and together we followed the path of destroyed vegetation.

The smell of smoke got stronger as we went, and so did another smell, sweet and choking and horribly familiar.

In a few minutes, we'd found the wagon, or what was left of it. The wood had been smashed. A horse was still in its traces, stiff-limbed but not yet bloated. Flies had started to buzz around it. The smoke was coming from the wood, which was damp but still weakly smoldering.

I tried to breathe shallowly. The stink was strongest here. "How didn't anyone see this?" I asked. My thoughts raced. By the state of the horse, it hadn't been here long. A day, if that. When had it happened? _At night_ , I thought. It must have been. Traffic wouldn't be rumbling past peaceably if travelers had been attacked in broad daylight. Someone would have seen it. Word would have flown. Or was that what Tymora's courier had been in such a hurry to relay? _No_ , I thought. The corpses' eyes were all open. _If he'd been the one to find them, he would've closed their eyes._ So this had happened at night, with no one else around to see, and the passersby had either assumed or hoped that the smoke was from a campsite and passed on by.

Magda went and kicked dirt over the burning wood, savagely. She didn't say anything.

I moved further into the glade. There were bodies. Not many. A man. A child. My foot touched something soft. I looked down and recoiled. I'd stepped on a hand. My eyes traced it back to a woman's corpse, half-hidden under a bush. When I shoved the leaves aside, I saw the arrow in her chest. "Fuck," I said, quietly but fervently. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing. I groped through the leaves to shut them. Her skin looked like wax, but it felt like skin, only much too cold and still.

Magda called. "Rebecca," she said. "Look at this."

I turned to see her crouching over another corpse. "What's – oh, wow. Ugh." This guy had a gash across his throat. I could see torn meat and a bloodless ring of cartilage where his windpipe had been severed. I looked away from the gory sight. My eyes fell on the guy's chest, then narrowed. I stepped closer. His leather vest had been shoved aside, showing the breast of a black tabard. There was an insignia stitched there – a crescent moon and seven stars rising over a bay, sewn in thread-of-gold.

I sank into a crouch. "The hell?" I muttered. I shoved his vest aside for a better look at the crest. It didn't change even on closer inspection. I'd been kind of hoping it would, because it only made things more confusing. "What's a Waterdhavian guardsman doing dead in a ditch on the far side of Triboar?"

"That is not the strangest thing here." The dead guard had a cord around his neck. Mags sliced the cord with her belt knife and pulled it free. A black-painted canine tooth dangled from it. "The Blacktooth Band," she said grimly. She spat. "I thought we had schooled these scum."

The Blacktooth Band were bandits that had plagued the Long Road on and off for years. I knew Mags and other bandit hunters had tangled with them a time or three. I'd even been along for a couple of them, though mostly to shield the real fighters from arrows and otherwise stay the hell out of the way. "I didn't think they came this far east," I said.

Magda's voice was grim. "Nor do they normally recruit guardsman," she said.

"He must have been a deserter," I mused. "Which is weird all by itself." Waterdeep was one of the biggest, wealthiest, and safest towns around. Not many of its guardsmen deserted. Not with that sweet pension to look forward to. I shoved myself to my feet. "Well, we can't handle this on our own. We don't even know for sure what's going on. We need help."

Magda hmm'ed. "There is a guard station near Triboar-"

I snorted. "Useless. Their jurisdiction stops about a foot and a half from Triboar's walls, and as soon as this case runs out of their jurisdiction, they'll drop it like a hot potato." I nudged the guard's corpse with a foot. "And that's if they even pick it up in the first place, which they won't if they're afraid they'll be sticking their noses in Waterdeep's private affairs. Nobody's gonna volunteer to be the one left holding the short straw when their boss asks, 'So, which one of you dumbasses pissed off the Blackstaff?'"

Magda grimaced. "Politics," she groused. "I hate politics."

If only she knew – actually, scratch that. If Mags knew that I'd once been up to my neck in city politics, albeit in a very different city, she'd probably wring it, friend or no friend. I huffed a short, humorless laugh. "Don't worry," I said. "I've got a better idea."

Magda raised her eyebrows. "Which is?"

"There's a wayshrine of Shaundakul a little south of here, in the Dessarin Hills. I say we go there. Touch base. Ask 'em if they've heard anything, maybe pick up a few extra swords." There was safety in numbers, and I was starting to get a very prickly feeling between my shoulder blades.

The Uthgardt considered that. "Very well," she agreed. She stood, dropping her sword into its sheath on her back. "Shall we send word that we are coming?"

I saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head, blinked once, and saw the shadows under a gnarled old blueleaf tree coalesce into the shape of a man. He was leaning against the bole of the tree, wrapped head to toe in an old, dark traveler's cloak that almost seemed an outgrowth of the tree's trunk. I couldn't see his face, but I could see the hilt of an enormous greatsword rising over his shoulder, and when he turned his head to me I caught a flash of pale eyes and silver hair.

His eyes met mine. I thought I saw a lightning-quick grin, though it could just as easily have been a trickle of sunlight streaming through the leaves. Then he nodded.

When I blinked again, he was gone.

I turned back to Magda. "Don't worry," I said. "I think we just did."


	3. Vagrants

_A/N: Welcome to the Church of Shaundakul. It has no roof, no walls, and no altar, but it does have a whole lot of sky._

* * *

 _Does the road wind up-hill all the way?_  
 _Yes, to the very end._  
 _Will the day's journey take the whole long day?_  
 _From morn to night, my friend._

 _Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?_  
 _Those who have gone before._  
 _Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?_  
 _They will not keep you standing at that door._

 _Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?_  
 _Of labour you shall find the sum._  
 _Will there be beds for me and all who seek?_  
 _Yea, beds for all who come._

\- Christina Rossetti, "Up-Hill"

~*~  
Chapter 3: Vagrants  
~*~

The Dessarin Hills might have been mountains once, but now they were remnants, worn down to stubs like an old dog's teeth.

The late afternoon sun turned the hills' yellow grass gold and made their craggy white rock stand out in sharp relief. The hills were dotted with scattered stands of spruce and larch and aspen, but otherwise wide open to the sun and the wind.

One hill stood head and shoulders above the others. It looked out over the Evermoor Way to the north and the Long Road to the west. The roof of a single building was just barely visible from the foot of the hill, where a track started up the hill's northern side. The track was made of white gravel, weed-choked, and it zigged and zagged like a lightning strike.

As Magda and I started to climb the path, a lone figure came strolling down to meet us.

The figure was that of a tall, trim man, dressed simply in leather pants, a linen shirt, and a dark green traveling cloak. His hair was either white or a really sun-blasted shade of white-blonde, and his skin was deeply tanned. His face was what my grandmother would have described as 'patrician', and I knew without needing to see it that it was lined, though there was no telling how many of those lines came from age and how many from the sun. He didn't move like a man in the prime of his youth, yet he still had a youthful spring in his step. No use trying to guess his age. Most people ended up off by at least a decade in either direction, and his lips were sealed.

Magda stopped. "Is that-" The man drew nearer, near enough to clearly make out his features, and Mags threw back her head and laughed. "It is! It's old man Tarn!" she bellowed. In a moment, she'd closed the distance between them. In another, she'd grabbed him in a bear hug just like she'd given me earlier. "Well met! How in the Hells have you been?"

Tarn didn't answer. From the way she was smashing his face against her breastplate, he probably wasn't able to. I felt like I was watching a sleek white ermine get cuddled to death by the world's biggest golden retriever puppy.

Eventually, Magda put the man down. He fished his holy symbol out from the back of his shirt. "Magda, my dear," he said breathlessly. "How very wonderful to see you." He raised his hands, laughing, to fend her off as she went for another hug. "Mercy, my dear! Your affection warms my heart, but your fearsome grip quite rattles these old bones."

Magda sniffed, but let him go without molesting him any further. "Oh, bollocks," she tutted, her eyes dancing. "You do not look a day over four hundred. Five hundred at the outside."

Tarn smiled enigmatically. "You are too kind to say so, my dear," he told her. Then he turned and held his hands out to me. His smile deepened the lines at the corners of his eyes. They were the gray-green of lichen, cool as stone and warm as moss. "Rebecca," he greeted me simply.

I felt my face soften into an answering smile. I stepped toward him, taking his hands in my own. "Hey, sensei," I joked, or tried to.

Tarn gave me a knowing look. Then, his hands tightening around mine, he pulled me into a brief hug that was gentler than Magda's but no less fierce. "I have missed you," he murmured. "How fare you, my dear Rebecca?"

I returned his hug, feeling a relieved sigh leave my lungs. "Better now," I said. Tarn was here. He'd know how to handle this situation.

The first time I'd met Kelavir Tarn, I'd literally tripped over him in the little village of Red Larch on my way to find the man I thought had ruined my life, only to discover that the man in question was actually a god and I'd done all the ruining by myself anyway.

The second time I met Kelavir Tarn, I'd stumbled into him on a back road in the Dalelands, days after I'd turned my back on the portal home.

I didn't think the second meeting had been any more of a coincidence than a first. Deciding to give this Windwalker thing a try was one thing. Actually knowing how to do it was another. I'd needed an experienced teacher, somebody to show me the tricks of my new trade. Lucky for me, I knew a god who knew a guy who just happened to be perfect for the job and had a few months to kill.

We'd walked down a lot of roads together in those months, a little like Harry and I had, way back when. A little like Harry, I couldn't quite define what Kelavir Tarn meant to me - whether he was my friend, or my mentor, or my hero, or some complicated jumble of all three. "How've you been?" I asked, trying not to search his face too obviously for signs of incipient mortality.

Kelavir smiled. "Quite well," he said. "Better now that I know my student apparently retained enough of her teaching to remain in one piece."

I grinned. "And I've hardly even got any new holes in me, either." I reached into my pocket. "Here. I have something for you. You told me to give it back when we saw each other again." Groping in my pocket, my fingers brushed something smooth and small. I retrieved it and held it out to him with a smile. "Remember?"

Kelavir laughed and took the stone, holding it up to the light. It was a little chunk of malachite, polished smooth. "I remember," he said. "Though I never had any doubts." He pocketed the stone. A long-suffering look crossed his face. He took my hands and lifted them to eye level, pursing his lips at the sight of my shirt cuffs, peeking past the edges of my scale-and-leather bracers. "Rebecca," he said then. "Please. Buy some new clothing. I beg – no. I _implore_ you."

I looked at my cuffs. They were a little frayed. Okay, a lot frayed. But these still covered my wrists and on cold nights I could tug them down to help keep my hands warm, so really, what more could you ask from a sleeve? "Why?" I asked. "What's wrong with the clothes I have now?"

Kelavir's face went tactfully blank. "My dear girl," he said. "I would not even know how to begin to answer that question."

Magda was grinning. "Give it up, Tarn," she said. "Our little noble would not be our little noble if she did not look as if someone had lately dragged her noble arse backwards through a hedge."

Tarn put his head to one side, then gave a wry nod as if conceding the truth of the Uthgardt's words. "Far be it from me to disagree," he said, and offered me his arm in a gesture so courtly I almost looked around to make sure we were still standing under the open sky and not the rafters of some royal hall. "But I digress. The others are waiting. Shall we go?"

I took his arm. "Let's," I said.

From the top of the hill, the Dessarin valley stretched out in all directions under a wide open sky. The valley was a green-and-brown patchwork of pastures and groves and wild fields, dotted here and there with the roofs of farmsteads. Evermoor Way wound west to east, and the Long Road struck straight northeast to southwest. The fieldstone walls of Triboar rose where the two roads met, and the riverstone walls of Yartar rose where the Evermoor crossed the Dessarin. My eye could trace the two roads all the way to the horizon, where their broad ribbons narrowed to threads. On the horizon, I saw the Sword Mountains and the High Forest and even, looming above the misty southwest shore, the peak of Mount Waterdeep.

The view was gorgeous, but the hill itself wasn't much to talk about. There were a few trees, a nondescript log cabin, and a single standing stone at the end of the path, at the highest point of the hill. The stone had been pierced with holes, and the wind whistled faintly through them. Kelavir touched the stone as he passed, his fingers brushing a spot where the rough stone was worn so smooth it was almost shiny. I did the same, and wondered how many other hands like ours had done the same thing and over how many centuries.

The cabin, on the other hand, didn't look like it had been there long. Neither did it look like it would last much longer. Whoever'd built it had apparently decided that prayer was adequate proof against tetanus, and had slapped a rusty sheet of metal on top of the cabin and called it a roof. They'd also heard about things like straight lines, right angles, and flush joints, but they weren't having any part of that newfangled engineering shit. As shelters went, the cabin had all the disadvantages of sleeping out in the open with none of the view. Also, the window was broken. Someone had had the bright idea to hang a square of canvas over it, but they must have robbed a grave to get it, because it was mostly green with a few black spots and looked more like a burial shroud than a window treatment.

Outside the cabin were two horses, loosely picketed, an old birch with bare branches outspread, and a paraplegic table. I wasn't sure you could even call it a table, since most tables had at least three legs to their name, but this one still had two good legs left, was made of wood, and was flat on top, so you could still probably call it a table and no one could technically tell you that you were wrong.

One of the table's legless corners was propped up on a keg, and the other sat on an old tree stump. Because the stump was lower than the keg, someone had added a few books on top of it to bring the table up to level. They were thick books, with arcane symbols burned into the leather along their spines. In the right hands, they would probably have revealed the mysteries of the universe. In these hands, they were devoting their untold knowledge to keeping everyone's beer from sliding sideways off the table.

The table wasn't empty. There were people at it, all of them apparently absorbed in a card game that seemed to be in progress. Judging by the pile of pennies, tokens, and random junk that made up the pot, it was the lowest of a low stakes game, the kind you played with friends just to pass the time.

At the table's head sat a bald dwarf, his shoulders hulking beneath his studded leather coat. He was hunched over his cards, gnawing on a blade of grass, and the tankard in front of him was almost empty except for a few flecks of foam clinging to the sides. A sword was propped against the back of his chair. It was about as tall as he was.

The dwarf was the first person to look up when we reached the table. His skin was bronze and seamed with scars, his beard was long and black and forked like a pair of upside-down devil's horns, and his nose looked like he regularly broke it on other people's heads. He had a face that could take a bad reputation and ruin it, and when he saw us coming, his face split in an ear-to-ear grin, showing a pair of gold choppers where his front teeth should have been. "Oy, Rebecca, y'crazy halfling-haired bint!" the dwarf bellowed. "Where in the Hells've you been?"

I let go of Tarn's arm and sauntered up behind the dwarf. "Oh, you know," I said, and leaned down to kiss the top of his scarred bald head. "Here and there."

He twisted around to glower up at me. "Hey, now, you don't think you're going to get away with a little peck like that, do you?" he pouted, and tapped his lips with a stubby forefinger. He wore a fingerless leather glove on his right hand. It had been dyed a purple so dark it was almost black, and a hammered metal disc was embedded in the back of it. The pointing hand and winds were engraved on the disc's face. "Come on," the dwarf leered. "Lay a nice wet one on the ol' Bastard, there's a good girl."

I didn't move. "You're a pig, Bazkas," I said calmly.

He barked a laugh. "I am what I am," he said. "Never made no claim otherwise." He eyed Magda admiringly and raised his voice. "Oy, Thundertits! Nice to see ya. How's the bandit bashing business?"

She casually cuffed the back of his head as she passed him on her way to the keg. "Poor," she said. "I have been considering a turn in the dwarf tossing business, instead. What think you, little lout?"

"Hah! I'd gladly let you toss me clear to Maztica in exchange for nothing more'n a good long look of that hind end o' yours." He eyed her again. "I've sorely missed it."

"Well, I cannot say that I have missed yours, so I will thank you to stop showing it to me," she retorted. She downed a gulp of ale, then burped. "Or…is that your face? Beg pardon." The Uthgardt gave him an arch smile. "With you it is so hard to tell the difference."

I busted out laughing. Down the table, a jittery half-elf giggled. "'Ware, Baz," he said slyly. "I think you've just been told." He clasped Magda's hand, then extended his hand to me, grinning. His grass-green eyes were as bright and wide as a cat's. "Magda! Rebecca! How do?"

The half-elf had wiry, carrot-colored hair, ears like a pair of pointy jug handles, and the kind of grin you usually found on the faces of wholesome youngsters who said things like, "Gee golly willickers!" and whose presence in the neighborhood meant that you'd shortly be digging BB pellets out of your vinyl siding and sweeping your porch for flaming bags of dog shit. I grinned back at him. "Not bad, Alaran," I said warmly, and leaned over Baz's shoulder to grip the half-elf's proffered hand. He had a stiff leather bracer around his wrist, the kind that archers wore. An oval of dull metal flashed from the back, momentarily revealing a glimpse of the hand-and-winds carved into it. "Rumor has it you've been working miracles for the gem trade in Esmeltaran."

"Ha! I fell across an open shaft and face-first into an outcrop of raw ruby, you mean." The half-elf let loose a nasal bray of a laugh. "Just my dumb luck, eh?"

Another man spoke up. This one was human, and he could only be described as beautiful. He was tall and fit, with chiseled features, rich brown skin, full lips, and wide amber eyes. His hair was a sleek mane of beaded braids, and they brushed against the collar of his forest green cloak every time he moved his head. His voice, though, was soft and shy. "Credit where credit is due, my friend," he pointed out. "If not for you, that shaft would never have been found." Then he looked slightly embarrassed. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I did not mean to interrupt."

"You kidding, Atuar?" I answered. "You're just the man I wanted to talk to." Then I grinned. "Would you believe me if I told you that I was just in your old hometown?"

Some of Atuar's self-consciousness fell away as he smiled. "Truly?" he asked eagerly. "You have been to Chult?"

"I have," I confirmed. "Just made it back to the Sword Coast a few, uh, tendays ago, as a matter of fact."

Atuar beamed. "What luck!" he exclaimed. "What marvelous luck!" He leaned forward. A heavy metal amulet fell out of the collar of his cloak, the hand and winds etched on its face. "Tell me, what did you think of my homeland's jungles?"

I thought about that for a minute. "Is there anything in that place that won't try to eat you?" I asked at last.

A few chuckles and one dwarfish snicker sprouted up around the table. Atuar leaned back, smiling ruefully. "Some of the plants, perhaps," he suggested. He cocked his head. "Not all," he added. His eagerness returned. "But tell me, did you not find it beautiful?"

I scrounged for something to say that wouldn't amount to telling a homesick man that his country was, not to put too fine a point on it, a disease-ridden hellhole full of man-eating lizards, man-eating bugs, man-eating plants, and, if you were _really_ unlucky, man-eating men. "The flowers," I said at last. "The flowers were something else." Everywhere I went, the jungle had been thick with long, trailing vines, each one dripping with orchids like jewels on a cord. "I'd never seen flowers of so many colors before." For a while there I thought I'd just eaten the wrong kinds of mushrooms. There'd been plenty of those, too. "Not all in one place."

Atuar laughed again, a nostalgic gleam in his eyes. "Yes," he said. "I know what you mean." His voice turned wistful. "These northlands have their own rugged beauty, but there is more life in a handful of jungle soil than in all of the forests of this reach."

"I know," I said drily. "I think the dirt tried to eat me, too."

A woman half-rose from her seat. She was sloe-eyed and tiny, though the dagger at her belt suggested that tiny didn't mean harmless. She wore a bright red scarf over her hair, a purple sash around her waist, and a leather vest laced tightly over a white blouse that had a collar all the way up to her chin. Her hand went to her headscarf as she rose, touching it like she wanted to check that it was still there. Bracelets jangled around her wrist. One of them was a hammered copper cuff with an oval of yellowed ivory set in the middle. The winds and the hand were carved into the oval's face. "Well met," she said, offering me her hand and a smile. Her voice was smooth and low. "I am Zigana, and you must be Rebecca."

I clasped her hand. "Nice to meet you, Zigana," I said, and meant it, which felt weird. That symbol on her wrist meant we were family, of a sort, only I'd never been good at the whole family thing. Oh, I'd had a lot of relatives, but the thing about coming from an old, proud family is that there are always a lot of old, proud grudges, all of them cultivated for generations until the smiles shone like knives and the undercurrents became rip tides. It wasn't that we didn't love each other. It was just that we also kind of hated each other, too, only you couldn't make a scene about it because that just wasn't done so on the rare occasions when we couldn't avoid each other we buried the hatchet in brittle small talk and unfathomably expensive scotch.

On top of that, I'd been an only child, my mom had died when I was so young that I could barely remember what she looked like, and my dad had done what he could but he had to be away a lot for work, so there'd been a series of nannies and maids and friends from school and dinner parties where I made nice with important adults, but that wasn't really the same as family. And while the constant flow of people in and out of my life meant I'd learned to get along with most everybody, somehow I'd never quite figured out how to get close to anybody.

Then I'd gotten adopted by a whimsical old windbag, and suddenly the only child had a whole lot of brothers and sisters. Not only that, but this was a family that had more than blood to bind it. We followed the same god. Whatever our differences, the common threads that drew us to Shaundakul also drew us together. It felt strange but good, to finally have that sense of belonging after spending most of my life feeling like a black sheep. At the same time, it was also a little sad, because now I knew how fucked up and barren my idea of family and friendship had been before I came to this world.

Dismissing those melancholy thoughts, I turned to the next man. He was grey-haired, grey-eyed, and sat so still and quietly that I might have missed him sitting there if he weren't such a big guy. A quiver of arrows and a longbow were propped next to him, and he wore boiled leather in shades of gray and green that were made for blending into the shadows of a forest. He looked up at me. His lips moved in what may have been the beginnings of a smile. "Vilholm," he said simply. He wore a bracer like Alaran's, and his hand, when it gripped mine, had a bowman's callouses. "Pleasure," I said just as simply, since sentences above two syllables didn't seem to be his style.

Cards slapped rapid-fire against the table. "Good. Now that we've all made nice, let's play," Baz said. He finished shuffling and passed the deck to Atuar, who cut it. "You two in?" he asked me and Magda.

Magda crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. "We have pressing business to discuss," she said. "Surely we do not have time for games."

I slid onto the bench next to Alaran. "Before we do anything else, we need to talk and make plans," I said. "And we can do that while we play." Magda frowned, then shrugged and took a seat between Zigana and Atuar. The bench creaked alarmingly. "Deal us in, Baz," I added. "And somebody pass me a drink."

Bazkas grinned. "I'll toast to that," he said, and hoisted his tankard in my general direction. "To fine ale and fine friends."

Around the table, glasses in various states of emptiness were raised.

"Wind's blessings on all of us," murmured Atuar, devoutly. He bowed his head.

Zigana inclined hers. " _Sastimos_ ," she said formally, and lifted her glass high.

"To your health and my wealth!" chirped Alaran, and waved his stein in the air. Beer slopped over his wrist. "Oh, blast. That'll stain for sure."

"To dear friends," said Kelavir. He sat next to me and lifted his mug, which was steaming and smelled like some kind of herbal tea. "May we never quarrel, and if we do, may you be in the right."

Magda took a full tankard from Zigana and saluted with her free hand. "To lost baby birds," she boomed, and grinned at me. "And other creatures who wander too far from home."

Since I was no friggin' bard, I kept my toast short and sweet. "Cheers," I said, and clinked brims with her and everyone else at that table.

We drank.

Baz banged his stein back down on the table and wiped his mouth with the back of his gauntleted hand. "All right," the dwarf said then, and cracked his knuckles. "Let's play."


	4. Cards

_You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,  
_ _Know when to walk away and know when to run.  
_ _You never count your money when you're sittin at the table.  
_ _There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.  
_ _  
_\- Kenny Rogers, "The Gambler"

 _I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train._

\- Oscar Wilde

~*~  
Chapter 4: Cards  
~*~

Baz dealt the first round. I collected my cards and fanned them into a hand. "So," I said. "What did Ol' Windy tell you?"

Kelavir spoke up. "That you were close, coming, and bore ill news," he answered. His smile was wry. "Naught else."

I sighed. "All right," I said. I should have expected as much. The gods helped those who helped themselves and all that. "We'll fill you in."

Over the next few rounds, Magda and I gave the assembled Windwalkers a summary of our finding – the attacked caravan, the dead guardsman, and our suspicions.

Zigana rearranged her cards delicately, frowning. "There have been troubling rumors out of Waterdeep of late," she said, when we were done. "It is under attack, apparently from within, though none are sure of the source or even the nature of these attacks." She hmm'ed in thought, then added, "There have also been several assassinations. That may explain the guard's apparent desertion, if he feared for his life."

I grunted. "Could be something going on between the Lords," I said.

Zigana was already shaking her head. "It is rare indeed for them to enter into conflict with one another," she disagreed. "And even rarer for that conflict to turn deadly."

"Maybe," I said dubiously. As far as I was concerned, politics was politics, and the more power there was at stake, the more likely things were to turn ugly, regardless of how virtuous those in power claimed to be. "But there's a first time for everything."

"I met a merchant on the Long Road," Alaran supplied. He threw a penny in the pot. "He said it was krakens from the sea, and the Dock Ward near destroyed."

Bazkas snorted. "Krakens? Bollocks," he scoffed. "They've attacked before, and the ballista have made short work of 'em. I'd lend more credence to those who've pointed to trouble from Undermountain, and not much at that."

"I would tend to agree," Tarn put in. He was fiddling with something that looked like a chunk of white gravel, turning it over and over in his fingers. A slight tingle of power raised the hairs on the back of my neck. "Those who enter Undermountain assume great risks, but its master keeps his madness to his own domain. If not, Waterdeep would be long since destroyed."

"Kuo-toa?" Alaran suggested hopefully. "Or maybe a sea serpent? I read a book about sea serpents once. They seemed awfully fearsome."

Baz glared at the half-elf. "That's even more fantastical than the Undermountain idea," he growled. "Would you kindly leave off with the attack-from-the-deep nonsense, y'halfwit?"

Alaran slouched sulkily behind his cards. "But I _like_ sea serpents," I heard him mumble. "Why can't it ever be sea serpents?"

I took a thoughtful swig of beer. "We saw one of Tymora's couriers outside of Yartar," I said. "He was in a hell of a rush. I didn't think much of it then, but now I'm wondering if the Luckbringers know something we don't."

Tarn pursed his lips. "It has been some time since I last paid my respects to our dear Velantha," he said thoughtfully. He bounced the stone in his hand. "Past time. I might ride to Yartar tonight and find what word Tymora's priestess has had from her messengers."

Atuar cleared his throat. "Bandits move quickly, and they may yet have survivors for ransom," he said. "Best we move quickly, too. Once night falls, Akris and I will track them. God willing, we will be able to scout their location, numbers, and defenses and be away before they are the wiser."

A quiet, gruff voice made us all turn. "I'll help," Vilholm offered.

Atuar inclined his head. "The company would be welcome," he said.

"Fine," Bazkas said. He drank deeply of his ale. "In that case, while you lot snoop, I'll stay here and hold the fort." He grinned. "Along with anyone who feels like holdin' it with me, o' course."

Alaran shrugged. "I'll stay with you. I'm not much use as a scout, and I think Velantha's still angry at me after that little, um, accident with her sacramental wine."

Zigana's lips quirked. "I will ride with Tarn, and speak to her on your behalf," she told Alaran. "Surely she cannot remain angry forever."

Alaran winced. "If you think that," he said. "You've obviously never made Velantha angry."

Magda shifted irritably. "I do not like sitting here, twiddling my thumbs," she said.

I leaned across the table and tipped the contents of my beer mug into hers. Ale foamed. "You won't be twiddling your thumbs," I said. "You'll be enjoying a nice drink and keeping us company while _we_ twiddle _our_ thumbs."

The Uthgardt's eyebrows lifted. She wrapped her fingers around her mug, a reluctant smirk forming on her lips. "Is that so?"

Bazkas caught my eye and winked. "Oh, aye. That's so." He shoved my mug down the table for a refill before dealing a new round. "So, didya hear about Atuar's little accident?" he asked me then.

"Ooh, ooh, tell them the story, tell them the story!" That was Alaran, bouncing up and down in his seat like a toddler at an ice cream parlor.

"I'm telling it, I'm telling it," Baz growled. "Keep your britches on, boy."

With her long and tapered fingers, Zigana deftly unfolded her cards into a perfect fan shape. "I second that," she added, with feeling. "Now, shush, Alaran."

Alaran pouted. "Aww, Zig-"

She leaned across the table to touch her finger to his lips. "Shush, Alaran," she repeated gently. "We are trying to listen." To my private amazement, Al shushed, his freckled cheeks turning pink to match the sunset.

I took a long swig from my mug. Re-arranged my hand a little, so I could see better what I had to play with. "What accident?" I asked.

Baz leaned back and propped his tankard onto his belly, getting into full story-telling mode. "Well, y'see, it goes like this," he announced expansively, gesturing with his hand of cards. "Our little bushwacker-"

Atuar looked up from his cards. "Little?" he asked mildly.

"-sorry, I meant to say _big_ bushwacker, big, big man, in fact he's so big he needs two hands just to lift his-"

" _Baz_ kas." That was Zigana, her voice quelling.

"Pfft. Where's your sense of humor, girl?"

Atuar's face was like a neon sign. He had a decent hand but from the way he peered around, he didn't know what we had, or whether to fold or to hold what _he_ had. So I saw his bet and raised it. Sure enough, he folded. "Get on with it, Baz," I said mildly.

He huffed in annoyance. "Fine, fine," he grumbled. "Don't laugh at my jokes. Be that way. See if I care." He threw a few coins in the pool. "Anyway, our big bushwhacker made a little boo-boo. He agreed to guide a caravan of mages to the headwaters of the Heartblood-"

"That's not much of a story, Baz," Alaran broke in. He discarded, drew, wrinkled his nose, and left me wondering just how much of an actor he was. If I had to bet, though, I'd have bet on him being a pretty bad one.

Wordlessly, I saw Baz's bet and raised that, too.

The dwarf's face didn't change, but his eyes moved from me to Alaran and back, a quick side-to-side flicker I'd have missed if I hadn't been looking for it. "I'd get to the story if you'd stop interrupting me, you sticky-fingered nitwit," he groused.

"Sorry, Baz." Alaran sounded contrite. Maybe he was a better actor than I'd thought.

"Hmph." Baz sounded about as skeptical of Alaran's sincerity as I felt. "Anyway, it seems that one of these mages – the leader of the pack, no less, some kind of merchant in magical sundries - had a familiar."

"What kind of a familiar?" I prompted.

Baz 's next response came readily, like he was reading from a script. "A rat."

I played along. "What kind of a rat?" I asked.

He started to grin. "Well, I don't know the specifics, but I do know that it _was_ a live rat."

I lowered my cards and raised my eyebrows. "And now?"

"Now? It's breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

I looked at Atuar's face, or tried to. He'd buried it in his hands, shaking his head ruefully. Suspicion dawned. "Oh, no," I breathed.

Baz's grin widened. "Oh, yes," he chortled.

"Oh, no." I turned to Atuar, laughing incredulously. "That thing of yours _ate_ the guy's familiar?"

Atuar looked up. "That thing, as you call him, is my boon companion and a proud child of Ubtao," he said defensively. Then he winced. "And it was entirely my fault," he added with a sigh. "Akris's last meal was poor, and he was preparing to molt. I should have foreseen the risk-"

"-and had him eat somebody else's familiar?" Bazkas broke in. He was grinning nastily. "Somebody who wasn't employing you at the time, maybe?"

Zigana dropped a few pennies into the pool. Her hand hesitated above the pool for a second before she took it back, like she was rethinking the wisdom of the move. "You can be a singularly disagreeable individual when you set your mind to the task, O Honored Bazkas," she murmured.

"Aye," Baz agreed, and waggled a finger at her. "And don't ever let anybody ever tell you otherwise." He looked around the table. "All right," he said then, and smirked. "Show the ol' Bastard what you've got."

We played our hands. Baz had a full house. Zig had two of a kind. I had a straight flush.

Baz scowled at me as I threw my cards back on the pile and leaned forward to help myself to the pool. "I'll beat you yet, woman," he said.

I smirked. "You're welcome to try," I said, and raked in my earnings.

"And I'll bloody well succeed, y'contemptible, mop-haired tart."

"Aw, c'mon, Baz. You know you love me."

"I know I'll paddle your arse like a drum if you don't stop smirkin' at me like that."

Zigana cleared her throat. "An interesting game," she interrupted thoughtfully. She picked up her cards and smiled in a self-deprecating kind of way. "I will confess, though, that I do not seem to have a knack for it," she admitted. "There are far too many rules."

I shrugged. "That's all right, Zig," I reassured her. "You'll learn as you go." I turned my attention back to Atuar. "So, how'd you break the news to the guy?" I asked him curiously.

"Well, of course I offered to make amends for the tragedy, before all else," Atuar replied. He sighed. "But the mage would hear nothing of it."

"Maybe he should've had a bigger familiar." That was Alaran again, grinning from ear-to-ear.

"Perhaps, perhaps not," Kelavir mused. He lounged next to me, poring over his cards with detached interest and rolling the white chunk of rock in his hand. It might have been my imagination, but the rock seemed rounder than before, its jagged edges smoother. "I do not think even a dire wolf would present much of a challenge to our friend Akris."

"Speak for yourself. That beast ain't no friend of mine." That was Baz's bassy rumble.

"Sshh!" Magda made a swatting motion in the dwarf's general direction. "Magda would like to hear the rest of the story."

Atuar shrugged. "There is little more to tell," he said. "Once my duty was done and the mages safely returned home, I planned to ask Shaundakul for forgiveness for the harm I had done to his reputation with my inattention and poor judgment." He heaved a sigh. "But I could not."

Kelavir arched a pale eyebrow at him. "Strange," he said. "I cannot imagine that he would not at least hear you out."

Atuar waved his hands helplessly. "Oh, no, no, no, nothing like that," he said. "He was quite patient with me." The Chultan paused awkwardly. "I…simply found myself unable to utter the apology I had intended."

"Why not?"

Atuar grimaced. "Because he _would not_ stop laughing."

Around the table, laughter rose up like a gale. Baz roared and pounded his thigh so hard that anything but a dwarven femur would have snapped right in half, Zigana turned her head and laughed into her hand, Alaran tittered like a nervous debutante, I broke into hoots, Kelavir's deep, merry laugh rang out across the hillside, and even Vilholm's quiet chuckle came out to play.

Our Chultan brother looked on, resigned. "Yes," he sighed. "It was very much like that, in fact."

I wiped my eyes, subsiding. "You have to admit, it _is_ pretty funny," I observed.

"In hindsight, yes." It was hard to tell, with his deep brown skin, but I was ready to bet that Atuar was blushing. "It was also very, very embarrassing."

Kelavir chuckled. "If it is any consolation," he offered, "We have all had our fair share of similarly embarrassing experiences."

"Oh, aye," Baz snickered. "Some of us have even had books written about theirs." He waggled his eyebrows at me. "Eh?"

Alaran lurched upright. "Ooh, ooh, I remember that one!" he said eagerly. Then he flung his arms wide, striking a dramatic pose. Ale sloshed. "Shadows of Undrentide!" he intoned. "EXPERIENCE the Adventure! FEEL the Passion! WITNESS the Great and Terrible Peril-"

"And terrible spelling," Zigana interrupted delicately. She winced. "Terrible, _terrible_ spelling."

Alaran lowered his arms. The tips of his pointed ears twitched, like the ears of a cat who'd just sighted a particularly wiggly piece of string. "Oh, so you've read it, too?" he asked brightly.

Zigana's expression went opaque. "I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this accusation," she said.

Alaran laughed. "Oh, come off it, Zig," he teased. "I've _seen_ the books you like to read. You know, the ones in the plain brown covers that steam when they get damp-"

The woman sniffed and raised a hand to her silk-swathed hair. "I have no idea what you are talking about," she said.

The ginger-haired half-elf ignored her and kept talking, apparently warming to his subject. "-and inside they go on and on about tearing bodices and heaving derrieres and all that-" he went on.

"Don't y'mean heaving bosoms?" Bazkas interrupted curiously.

Alaran grinned foxishly. "Not in the one _I_ read."

Zigana looked hurt. And slightly annoyed. "You read my book?" she asked Alaran incredulously.

At least the half-elf had the good grace to look embarrassed. "Well…I skimmed it," he admitted. Then his tone turned defensive. "I was curious! Besides, you didn't even notice it was gone."

"You _stole_ my _book_?" Zigana's forehead furrowed. Irritation vanished, to be replaced by utter mystification. "Wait. _How_ did you steal my book?"

Magda looked back and forth between them. "Is Magda missing something?" she asked suspiciously. "Is there a particular art to stealing books among you so-called civilized folk?"

Zigana waved a hand. "Oh, no, nothing like that," she said with a disarming smile. "Alaran is just a terrible thief."

Alaran's lower lip stuck out slightly. "Oh, I say-"

Magda's face went blank with confusion. "Terrible as in…he is a terror to all honest men?" she ventured.

Baz snorted. "No," he said bluntly. "Terrible as in he's no good at it. Idiot elf-get could pick a corpse's pocket at midnight on a moonless night in an abandoned graveyard in the middle of the Marsh of Tun and he'd _still_ get caught."

Alaran's lower lip stuck out a little further, until it hit a full-on pout. "Oh, come on, Baz, that's not fair," he protested. "It was a zombie." He paused. " _And_ there was a full moon," he added.

Atuar spoke up in his mild voice. His face, when he looked at mine, was sympathetic. "Myself, I hardly remember that book," he said. "No doubt we have all forgotten it."

I gave him points for trying, but given the company, it was an attempt doomed to failure. True to form, Bazkas burst into laughter. "Forgotten it?" he leered. "Are you joking? I've got the whole thing memorized, stem to stern."

"That, I do not doubt," Kelavir put in drily.

The dwarf went wide-eyed. "What? What? Are you questionin' the purity of my intentions?" he demanded, all wounded innocence. "Are you impugnin' my character?" He sniffed. "I'll have you know that I've memorized the book for the noblest of reasons," he said piously. "I like to recite it to schoolchildren on my off-time."

I rolled my eyes. "Right," I said. "And who in their right mind would let _you_ near any schoolkids?"

Baz ignored me. Instead of answering, he went all teary-eyed and nostalgic. "It's the looks on their little faces that I cherish most," he said mistily. "Hits me right-" He thumped his chest with his gauntleted fist. "-here."

I sighed. "Baz-" I said wearily.

He droned on. "I remember one toddle-headed little runt in particular," he mused. "Full of questions, he was. I remember him asking me-" Baz made a show of wiping his eyes and sniffling before he went on. "'Master Bazkas?' the little tyke asked me. 'What does 'turgid' mean?'"

The table erupted in laughter. I joined in. What else could I do? It was funny. Sort of. "I hate you," I said ruefully. "All of you." I pointed a finger at Bazkas. "But especially you."

Baz snickered. "No, you don't," he told me. "All right. Cards up, people," he ordered, and followed his own orders by laying his own hand down on the table. He had a straight flush, and a really nasty grin besides. "Show me what you've got."

I showed mine – a ten-high straight. Not a winner, but I hadn't been paying attention. Atuar had folded early on, Alaran had four of a kind, Magda had two pairs, and Kelavir had a low straight, which wasn't bad considering that he didn't like card games and mostly just joined in to be sociable.

Then Zig spread her cards out on the table. We all stared at her.

She smiled. Dimples flashed in her cheeks. "I cannot be certain, of course, because this game has far too many rules," she said coyly, sweeping her fingers over the exposed faces of her cards. "But I believe that this is what you call a ' _royal flush_ '."

Bazkas looked at her cards. Then he looked over at me. "You know what?" he asked.

I looked back. "What?"

He made a face. "We probably should've known better than to play against a Gur."

I barked a laugh. "You're probably right," I agreed.

Zigana looked faintly anxious. "I have not offended you, have I?" she asked me and Bazkas impartially.

"You kidding?" I asked, and laughed again. I waved a hand. "Don't worry about it, Zig. If anything, I've offended myself."

"Aye," Baz rumbled. Morosely, he tapped the deck against the table to straighten it out. He started shuffling again. "We fell for the oldest trick in the book."

Zigana relaxed. "Ah," she said, and gave the edge of her headscarf a satisfied tug, smiling. "Well, that is a relief." She pushed the pot back. "Keep it. I was merely keeping my hand in." Her smile turned wry. "Old habits die hard, I suppose."

Alaran's head swung. "Well, well, what did _you_ used to do to get these habits?" he needled her, his eyes bright with intrigue.

Zig leaned forward and twitched the rumpled collar of his shirt straight. "Many things of which I am not proud," she said. "But that is neither here nor there." Then she stood. "The sun is setting," she said then, touching Tarn's hand. "We should go."

Kelavir stretched. Stiff joints popped and crackled. "Yes," he agreed. With a _plink_ , he set his rock on the table. The edges were totally smooth now, the rough gravel rounded to a polished pebble with pink and white striations. "It would be rude of us in the extreme to deprive our Luckbringer friends of their sleep."

Atuar rose. "We should be on our way, as well," he said. He looked over at Vilholm. "Do you need to make any preparations?"

Vilholm stood, picked up his quiver and longbow, and slung both across his back. "No," he said, and at a nod from Atuar, the two of them saluted us and made their way down the darkening hillside.

Bazkas had picked up the pebble, turning it over in his fingers. The thing had gone from dullness to a sparkling shine that was almost gemlike, as if it had spent a century in a riverbed instead of half an hour in Tarn's hands. "Is this quartz?"

Tarn shrugged. "It may be," he said, and stood. "There are more on the path, if you look for them," he added, crossing to where a tall, scabbarded sword rested against the cabin's wall. "They are pretty enough, though they have little value."

The dwarf dropped the quartz pebble. "I'll leave the stone shaping to you," he said drily. "Much as it pains me to admit that a human works stone better than I do."

The old cleric smiled. He reached the cabin and the sword – a tall one, almost as tall as Magda's, with a wide crosspiece and a long hilt. He swung the thing, scabbard and all, over his shoulder. "You have your own strengths, dearest brother," he said, and patted the dwarf's shoulder as he passed on his way to the horses, where Zigana waited with her hands full of reins. "As do we all."

And then they were gone, and all that were left were me, and Mags, and Alaran and Bazkas.

Baz dealt. We played until night fell and Alaran was nodding over his cards, at which point Mags announced that she was taking first watch and sent the rest of us off to bed.

I didn't argue. The night sky was star-studded and clear. Sleeping in the stuffy confines of the cabin didn't appeal to me, so I spread my blanket beneath the old birch. I curled up, yawning hugely, my head pillowed on an old tree root, the stars and moon shining above, and the sweet smell of new grass filling my head. It was better than any five star hotel, and a pleasantly buzzed contentment soon dragged me down into sleep.

My dreams that night were strange.

In them, firelight flickered, but there was no warmth in it. Laughter rang, but there was no humor in it. Air moved, but it was stale, and I found no comfort in it.

I wanted to leave – wanted nothing to do with that place, whatever it was - but I found that I couldn't. Something held me back. I was caught. It was infuriating. Then, when I realized that whatever held me held me so tightly that I couldn't get free at all, terror welled up in me.

Next thing I knew, I was suddenly sitting bolt upright, blind and befuddled for a few seconds as my brain tried and failed to tell me where I was or even whether I was awake or still dreaming.

Moonlight fell across my face. The fog seemed to clear. I could see the hilltop, drained of color under the waxing moon. It was quiet. A cool night breeze raised goosebumps on my sweaty skin. Shivering, I wrapped my blankets tighter around me.

 _Just the usual bad dreams,_ I thought. _Weird, though_. It had felt like one of my recurring nightmares, spawned from that time when I'd been caught in an avalanche, but those nightmares always featured snow. This one had had the same suffocating feeling, but the pressing cold I usually felt had been exchanged for that still, suffocating dark. It wasn't an improvement, but hey, it could have been worse. It could have been one of those nightmares about an endless fall out of a clear blue sky.

Suddenly aching all over, I curled up again. I didn't think I'd be able to get back to sleep, but I must have, because the next thing I knew, someone was saying my name and the morning sun was warm on my skin.

I opened my eyes. I heard my name again. There was a weight on my shoulder. A hand. I squinted and tried to sit up. A figure swam into view.

It was Alaran, crouched by my side. "Hey," he said. "Wakie wakie, Beccers."

 _Beccers?_ I tried to blink sleep out of my eyes. Noises intruded on my waking awareness – voices, rustling. "What?" I asked, trying to sit up. I dug my nails into the palm of my left hand. It itched like fire. "What's happening?"

The half-elf grinned foxishly. "Vilholm and Atuar are back," he said. "And they've brought a friend."


	5. Cry 'Havoc'

_Count those freaks  
We're completely outnumbered  
What a terrible world  
And it gets more peculiar every single day_

\- _Whitey, "Count Those Freaks"_

~*~  
Chapter 5: Cry 'Havoc'  
~*~

Folks were gathered near the cabin. The object of their interest was a man, apparently unconscious and hogtied with what looked like bindvine. My vision seemed to double, and I saw a tracery of red in the man's skull. "Who's he," I asked. "What happened to his head?"

Baz spared me a glance. "Blacktooth bandit," he said. "He's still alive. Barely. What in the Hells did you hit him with, Vilholm? A tree trunk?"

The grizzled ranger looked at his own knuckles. They were scraped. "My fist," he said. "Why?"

"Well, next time, use the tree trunk." Bazkas knelt, thumbing the unconscious man's eyes open. "You almost killed him."

Atuar spoke up. "We have their location and a rough count, but there were at least two dozen in the main camp, by the sound of it, plus several hostages. We could not get closer without risking discovery and the lives of their captives," he explained. He drew his dark green cloak around him more tightly. "But this one was alone. We wagered that he would not be missed, at least not immediately, and that he might be persuaded to talk."

The dwarf looked at the hostage for a long moment. His face was unreadable. "Good work," he said, then took a deep breath and put his fingers to our captive's temples. I felt a weird vibration of power echo in my bones right before I saw the bloody stain of injury in the bandit's skull fade away to nothing. The man's lashes flickered. He groaned. His eyes opened, unfocused. Then they focused on Bazkas. From the look on his face, uconsciousness would have been preferable.

Bazkas smiled horribly at his guest, gold teeth glinting. "Welcome," he said. "Do y'know where ya are?"

The man worked some spit into his mouth. It seemed dry. "No," he said warily.

"Ah. Well, you're at one of Shaundakul's wayshrines. That say something to ya?"

The bandit seemed to consider that. "No," he said, and spat at Bazkas's feet. "Not a thing."

The dwarf's sallow face went blank. "In that case," he said. "Let me explain." His fist tangled in the man's shirt, and without any apparent effort, he lifted the man up from his sprawl. "It works like this. You tell us where your camp is, how many men you have, how many captives you're ransoming, and how the place is guarded, including any traps you've laid around the perimeter, or you're going to have a very long, very bad day."

The bandit laughed and shook his head. "Idiocy," he said. "It's my life if I tell you."

"And it's your life if you don't," Bazkas returned. He didn't relinquish his grip. "But I'll tell you what. Talk, and we'll let you go."

The bandit stared at him. I had to give him credit. Bazkas' face wasn't an easy sight to take in without blinking. "Go where?"

The dwarf shrugged. "Wherever you damn well please," he answered. "We're not unkind. We'll give you enough coin to start a new life somewhere far from here, where your so-called friends can't reach you, 'long as you give your word to stop preyin' on travelers - _and_ you tell us what we want to know."

The bandit seemed to mull that over. "I'll see that purse, first," he said.

Baz reached into his jacket, pulled out a heavy, fist-sized pouch, and jingled it at the man.

The bandit shook his head. "Show me the coin," he said. "Else for all I know, you'll be ruining me for a fistful of gravel."

Bazkas sighed. "Why does nobody ever trust me?" he lamented, and upended the pouch on the table. Gold and silver shone in the early morning sunlight before he scooped them back up again.

The bandit licked his lips. "All right," he said. "You have a deal." Then he began to talk. Directions. Numbers – a dozen bandits, tops. A handful of hostages. And details on the camp layout. A lot of details.

I stared at him, hard. _He's lying._ The thought surfaced from somewhere deep in my gut. His information was too easy. Too glib. Too much, and it didn't match what Atuar and Vilholm had said. I didn't trust it.

Bazkas seemed to have the same feeling. "And how can we trust that you're telling us the truth?" he asked.

The bandit shrugged. "You're offering good gold," he said. "You've bought me fair and square. Why would I lie?"

Bazkas chuckled. "Good question," he said. His stubby finger twitched, beckoning. "Rebecca," he said.

My stomach knotted. "What?"

The dwarf jerked his head at the bandit. "You remember Soubar," he said.

I stared at my dwarven brother. I didn't dare beg out loud, but I thought my eyes did it for me. We'd tracked those mutineers from Daggerford to Soubar. Baz had seen the blood and burned wagons, but only the authors of that wreckage had known where the bodies were, and how many. They hadn't wanted to talk. I'd made them talk. I'd turned out to have a talent for it. "Yeah," I said. "I remember."

The dwarf met my eyes. "Think you can do it again?" he asked.

It wasn't a real question. He knew I could. Neither was it a command. That was the infuriating thing. This wasn't the church of Torm with their big, showy temples and big, showy ceremonies. We weren't like Helm's Watchers, who couldn't wipe their own asses without written permission, or the monks of Oghma, whose hierarchy was even more complicated than their filing system. We were independent agents, bound to explore and to help, but free to use our own judgement as to where and when and how. Baz had no rank to pull. None of us did. But he _could_ back me into a corner with a question, knowing damn well that I couldn't in good conscience tell him 'no'. I could make one bandit suffer, or I could do nothing and let a bunch of his captives suffer even more.

I turned to the bandit, seething. In spite of myself, I slipped easily into my second sight, seeing the networks of bone and muscle and blood that made up the man in front of me. I couldn't make a whole lot of sense of what I saw. I'd never been able to, even though I'd tried to learn. There was too much there, a complicated web of living tissue that I couldn't begin to understand, much less know how to put back together if it stopped working.

Thing was, you didn't have to know how something worked in order to break it.

Forcing everything else aside, I reached out and touched the man. He jerked away, but it was too late. I'd already made contact. My fingers closed around his arm, and the power in me hissed from my throat and sank down through flesh, into bone.

The loud pop of a breaking bone echoed over the hillside. The man screamed.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Bazkas lean close to the hostage. "Y'see," he said. "It might be that pain waits for you when you go back to your folk. But how much more will find there than here, if you don't tell us the truth?"

Sweat stood out on the bandit's forehead. "I've been hurt before," he said hoarsely. "If you think to torture me-"

Baz scratched his armpit. "Me? Think? Perish the thought." He nodded at me again. "Rebecca."

I saw sparks flaring, nerve signals screaming pain. I followed them up, to a knot at the base of his skull, and then up further, to a tight something-or-other behind his eyes. I pinched that knot with spectral fingers, crushing it like an ant.

The man jerked. He blinked, again and again, his eyes moving back and forth frantically but without any focus. He rubbed them, as if that would change matters. It didn't. The fear that hadn't been there before showed on his face, and suddenly. "Give it back!" he howled. "Give me back my eyes, damn you!"

Baz raised his hand. Gratefully, I let mine drop. "We will, if you give us the truth," the dwarf said. "All of it, or by Shaundakul I swear if you stand between me and those poor bastards you've chained, you'll die blind and deaf and covered in piss, but we'll leave your tongue so you'll go to the Abyss screaming and I. Will. Not. Give. A flaming _shite_."

The captive was panting, hard and fast and shallow. It took him a while to stop twitching. Then he started talking, haltingly, and this time his words sounded less easy and more true.

Bazkas listened carefully. At a certain point, he drew out a map from an oilskin tube, nodding along to the bandit's words and making marks on his map as our captive spoke.

At last, the bandit stopped talking. "All right," Bazkas said. "That should do it. Thank you." He took the coin-filled pouch from the table, bounced it on his hand a couple of times, then closed his fist around it, hauled back, and punched the bandit in the head. The man slumped back. His eyes were closed, and blood ran freely from his nose. The dwarf shook his hand to take out the sting. "Help me tie this bastard up to something heavy," he instructed. "I'll patch him up, then we'll drop him off in Triboar. They can give him a trial for his pains."

Atuar blinked at him owlishly. He wasn't the only one. "You said you would let him go free."

Bazkas shrugged. "I lied," he said. "Be serious, man. If I'd set him loose, there's a good chance he'd have taken the money and run right back to his friends. This way, we'll have no such surprises." He bent over to grab the bandit's feet. "Somebody take his shoulders. None too gently, mind."

The others moved to help. I backed away. Then, shuddering, I turned and stumbled towards the cabin.

Magda caught my eye. She reached a hand out, her forehead wrinkling in a voiceless question. I shook my head, once, sharply. I didn't want her near me. I didn't want anyone near me. I felt dirty. I just needed…something. Space. Air. Quiet. A bath.

The cabin's door squealed on its rusty hinges. Inside, there was a single room with a single, cluttered bookshelf, an ancient cot with an equally ancient wool coverlet thrown over it, a trapdoor to the cellar, and a lot of cobwebs. It felt drafty and smelled musty.

The cot's springs _glinked_ when I sat on it. I grounded the butt of Silent Partner and rested my forehead against its haft, closing my eyes. My hands were shaking. I tightened them around the quarterstaff to stop them.

I was a shit healer. I knew that. I'd never really had the knack, and practice hadn't made perfect. I could burn out an infection if I had to, and thanks to Harry and Farghan I could brew up a few useful potions, but every time I'd tried to knit a broken bone or close a wound, my fumbling had either caused so much pain that my patient had asked me to stop or, or it had even made things worse. I could probably close a paper cut, and if somebody was bleeding out, I might be able to keep them alive long enough to get to a real healer, but that was as far as it went.

But I could definitely hurt people. That, it seemed, I knew how to do. I didn't even have to think about _that_.

Once upon a time, in a desert far, far away, Xanos had told me that when it came to both sorcery and whatever kind of divine power I'd been granted, the power was just the raw material. Like water poured into a vessel, our power took on the shape of whatever mind it was poured into. With my half-orc brother's mercurial temper, it was no wonder he'd had a knack for fire. I wondered what it said about me, that I found it easier to crack bones than to mend them.

I sat, stewing. Thoughts of Xanos and the way I'd ditched him amped up the thumbscrew treatment from my conscience even further. I rested my head against Silent Partner's haft and wondered what Harry would think of me now. I'd tried to live up to the example he'd set for how to be a good person, the example his old weapon daily reminded me of, but sometimes I wasn't sure how well I'd succeeded. I wasn't much good at being good.

Maybe, once, that hadn't mattered so much. Once, I hadn't really had the power to do too much harm.

Now? Now, I had power, only sometimes I wondered whether I could be trusted with it.

The door's hinges squealed again. Hurriedly, I sat up, wiping my eyes. "Yeah," I said hoarsely. "What is it?"

A skinny, big-eared figure stood highlighted in the doorway. It was Alaran. "'Ullo," he said. "How are you?"

"What the hell kind of a question is that?" I heard myself snap. Then I winced, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. "Sorry," I said then. "Sorry. I didn't mean to snap. I'm fine."

The half-elf came closer. "Really?" he said. "You don't seem fine." He sat down next to me, lightly. "Want to talk about it?"

I scowled. "No."

Al pursed his lips. "All right," he said, undeterred. He patted himself aimlessly, then reached into a pocket and drew out a small wooden ball. Another emerged from another pocket, then a third. "In that case," the half-elf said. "Want to see me juggle?" He grinned and started to toss one ball from his left hand to his right. "I promise, it's a lot funner than talking, mostly 'cause I'm terrible at it."

I stared at him. Then, in spite of myself, I laughed. "You're nuts," I said.

"Might be," the half-elf agreed, starting to juggle the balls in a loop. One hit his knee, bounced, and rolled across the room. "Whoops. See? I told you. I'm no good at this." He juggled the remaining balls for a little while. Then he broke the silence again. "I tried to make a little coin at it, once," he said suddenly. "Even got so far as to manage five knives at a time, but then there was that little misunderstanding with the pasha's son, and, well, I'd like to know how I was supposed to tell he was a pasha's son, dressed as he was, but then the amlakkar got involved, and then-" He grimaced.

I studied his face. I didn't know much about Calimshan, but I thought I remembered hearing that it was a pretty bad place to be a half-elf. No wonder he'd left. "How'd you end up here, anyway?" I asked. "Not that I'm not happy you're here, but it's a long walk from Calimport."

The half-elf shrugged his slim shoulders. "I prayed." He caught my eye and grinned. "No. I tell you true. I prayed. That pasha's son? I nicked him with one of those juggling knives. Complete accident, really, but would they listen? Nooo, of course not." He rolled his eyes before going on. "So there I stood, up on the gallows, looking back on an entirely too-short life, most of which I'd spent in the gutter, and I'd never been religious but figured that if there was ever a time for prayer, this was it. So I closed my eyes, and I thought, _Fine. You got me. This is it. If there's any god out there who's got poor enough taste to take my scummy little soul, you can have it."_

"Lemme guess," I said, my voice dry. "Somebody took you up on that."

"Funnily enough, yes. I didn't actually _expect_ an answer, mind, just a sudden drop and a long sleep, so you can imagine my surprise when a great big gust of wind came up and knocked the whole gallows down, just happenin' to land in such a way that the noose slipped right off my neck." The half-elf laughed. "I didn't even stop to think. Just up and ran, until I reached an alleyway and this silver-haired human just stepped in my path out of nowhere and pointed to a doorway and said, 'In here, Alaran.' I didn't think to ask, oh, all the questions I should've been asking, like who he was and how he knew my name. I just ran where he pointed. Next thing I knew, I was in a field somewhere near Baldur's Gate." He laughed again. "Later, once I'd stopped pissing myself, I put it all together. One second, a convict, the next, a cleric – and a mighty fine improvement in circumstances, all told." His mouth twisted. "Turns out the wind'll sweep up anything, even the trash from the gutter."

I winced and touched his arm. "God, Alaran. Stop that. You're not trash," I said. _If anything, I am._

He shrugged again. "Maybe, maybe not, but I'm not good for much unless it's making an arse of myself for laughs, and I'm sure as the Hells not _brave_. Never have been. Not like you lot."

I snorted. "Brother," I said. "If you want bravery, you're looking at the wrong girl."

"Am I?" The half-elf bounced a ball from his right hand, off of his right elbow and back to his left hand. "Well, now. I don't know about that. It's a hard thing you did. I'd have heaved my guts out, myself, so it's good we had you around to do it or else we'd all be in heaps of trouble, runnin' into a fight blind like we was a bunch of Luckbringers."

"That supposed to make me feel better?"

"Well, yes," the half-elf said reasonably. "That was the general idea."

I couldn't help but smile.

We sat in silence for a while, the half-elf juggling idly while I tried to collect myself.

Eventually, the quiet was interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats.

Al and I exchanged looks. "Sounds like Zig's back," he said. A decidedly silly grin, quickly stifled, flashed over his face. He stood, pocketing his toys. "Shall we go see?"

The poor guy was almost twitching with excitement. If I made him wait, I thought he'd explode. "Sure," I said, and made for the door.

The scene outside was the closest thing to chaos I'd ever seen on that hill. Horses were rearing, and people were shouting at odds. Kelavir and Zigana were back, and good news didn't seem to be in the offering.

Tarn swung down from his saddle, a little stiffly. "You were right, Bazkas," he said, without ceremony. "Something has gone wrong in Undermountain. Waterdeep is overrun."

Next to me, Alaran jerked in surprise. "What?"

Zigana slid from her horse's back. "No one knows how, or why," she said. "Velantha herself cannot tell the reasons. But creatures are coming up. From the sewers, from the cellars, from the streets themselves. The city is in chaos, and Waterdeep has instituted a quarantine. None may enter. None may leave. The neighborhoods are blockaded."

Magda looked at them sharply. "And the guards?" she demanded. "The warriors? The men and women who should be defending this city? Where are they?"

"The militia has been recalled to Waterdeep," Kelavir replied. "Including those members on assignment elsewhere. All patrols. All troops. Waterdeep has withdrawn every sword it has." He took a deep breath. "The roads are unmanned."

The implications of his statement sank in.

Baz whistled between his teeth. "Shite."

Vilholm grunted. "Amen."

"There'll be chaos, even out here." That was Alaran. "You know what they say. As goes Waterdeep, so goes the North."

"There already is chaos." Zigana's tone was grave. "The attack Rebecca and Magda discovered was not the only one. Bandit activity has exploded in the past two days alone."

"And it will get worse," Tarn added. "The City of Splendors can weather a trade moratorium better than most, but even it cannot survive isolate for long. A month, and the surrounding area will enter into chaos and an economic slump. More, and the trade routes will shift. Long enough, and the balance of power may at last go to Neverwinter. It is the only other port city in the region capable of absorbing that level of trade."

Baz grunted. "Aye," he said. "Which means that whatever Waterdeep's got in there, they think letting it loose would lead to something even worse than all of that."

Thoughtfully, I twirled Silent Partner's butt end against the ground, carving a shallow depression in the soil. "Quarantine or no quarantine, if the situation gets ugly enough and doesn't look like stopping, people are going to take their families and run. Better to be a homeless refugee than dead."

Magda blew out a long, grim breath. "And the bandits will see the refugees as an opportunity," she said. "Count on it."

Bazkas shot her a scorching look. "Oh, no," he said grimly. "Not on any roads under my watch, they won't." He looked around. "I say we take the fight to these Blacktooth bastards, make an example of 'em so others'll think twice before followin' their example," he announced. "It's tall odds, but I've faced taller." His face darkened. "And I know how these folk operate. If they don't get their ransom, those hostages are as good as dead – and with all that's going on, chances are they won't get their ransom. I'll not stand by while that happens." His hand caressed the hilt of his sword. "I've done enough standin' by in my lifetime."

Zigana spoke up quietly. "Agreed," she said. She tugged her headscarf forward a little, shadowing her eyes. "I prayed to the god of my youth to give me the chance to make up for the terrible mistakes I made in my youth. He answered. I will not disappoint him by leaving innocent travelers to suffer."

Alaran looked at Zig, then shrugged, his face full of wry resignation. "Might as well," he sighed. "I've been livin' on borrowed time, anyway, ever since Shaundakul slipped me free of that noose. My life's his, if he wants it." He scowled. 'Sides, those bandits need a good punch in the nose if they think they can go around bullyin' people without consequence."

Atuar touched his holy symbol. "I did not know of Shaundakul before I saw his shrine on the Mistcliffs, but its wild beauty was such that I offered my soul to him then, and he accepted," he said. "Those people must be released. It is wrong to hold any creature against its will. If I die, then I die."

Magda spat. "I am Uthgardt. I do not shirk a fight, and I have spent years of my life fighting these cowardly scum. An honorable warrior tests her strength against worthy foes – she does not prey on the weak," she said. Then she smirked. "Besides, Magda needs more beer money. The last batch is almost gone."

I thought of the woman in the clearing, dead with a bandit's arrow sticking out of her. I thought of Harry, my first friend in this world, the kindest soul I'd ever known, dead with a bandit's arrow sticking out of him. "Somebody's got to stop them before they hurt anyone else," I said. And I could hurt them, now. I wasn't Harry. I wasn't kind, and I wasn't the helpless little girl he'd rescued. Not anymore. That girl had died in Undrentide. "Might as well be us."

Then we all looked at Vilholm. He looked back blandly, then shrugged. "It's a living," he said.

Baz looked at us all and grinned. "That's the spirit." With a crack of his knuckles, he pulled out his map and spread it on the table. "Here's where the Blacktooth Band is hiding. It's about half day's march. Best if we strike while the iron's hot. Magda. Vilholm. Atuar. C'mere. We'll need a battle plan."

Magda leaned over the table. "We should plan to strike after nightfall," she said. "They'll be befuddled with food and drink. Their guard will be down."

The dwarf grunted in agreement. "Sentries should be here, here, and here," he said, pointing out the spots on his map. "We'll need to take them out first. Split into teams, say…"

The rest of us gathered around while Bazkas and Magda wrangled out a plan, and we listened while the voices of better battle experience doled out tasks and times and contingencies.

It wasn't a bad plan, I thought. If we were lucky, I thought it might even work. And if we weren't, well, the advantage to being unlucky was that we wouldn't be alive to know it.

Bazkas rolled up his map and stood. "Speak now or forever hold your peace, lads and lasses," he said. "Do we all know what to do?"

A chorus of 'yes's answered him.

"All right, then." The dwarf reached for his sword. It was a squat, ugly thing, kind of like him, though in his hands it was long enough to be considered a two-hander. He hefted it a couple of times. Then he grinned horribly. His gold teeth glinted. "In that case," he said, "Let's go clean the road."


	6. Hawks

_Well, it's one for the money,_  
 _Two for the show,_  
 _Three to get ready,_  
 _Now go, cat, go!_

 _But don't you step on my blue suede shoes._  
 _You can do anything, but lay off my blue suede shoes._

\- Elvis Presley, "Blue Suede Shoes"

~*~  
Chapter 6: Hawks  
~*~

The moonlight rippled like water on the white-graveled road, filtering from sky to ground through a breezy lacework of branches. We moved beneath it, from moon to shadow to moon again.

Bazkas took the lead. He had a brace of throwing hammers across his chest, and that ugly two-hander in his hands. In the shadows beneath the trees, his bronze skin was leeched of color and his eyes gleamed like polished obsidian. Looking at him, I thought I knew how an orc might feel, coming up on a dwarf in a dark tunnel somewhere and realizing that, while getting an axe in the face is bad enough, getting it in the groin instead is no real consolation.

Alaran came after. His fingertips pattered up and down his bowstring like he was playing the piano, and his head kept swiveling back and forth, his eyes darting at every rustle in the trees.

Zigana was close behind him. She had her dagger at her belt, next to a long, looped silk cord and a tambourine with its clappers muffled. She picked her way across the ground, one hand on her dagger, her steps as neat and light as a deer's.

Atuar trailed them both. His feet didn't make a sound that I could hear, and with his hood up, I couldn't see his face. A crescent-shaped flash of moonlight winked off of the sickle in his hand.

Tarn was next, his strides long and loose and certain. He carried his greatsword with its pommel in his hand and blade itself leaning against his shoulder, so that he was almost cradling the weapon in the crook of his arm. He'd pulled his hood up to cover his white-blonde hair, so I couldn't see his expression. The fingers of his free hand were worrying another piece of stone. I wondered what this one would turn out to be once he was done playing human rock tumbler with it.

Magda brought up the rear. Her platinum hair was tightly braided and pinned up for a fight, so no one could get a grip on it. She carried Stormsplinter a little differently from Kelavir, with the hilt on her shoulder and crossguard braced against her upper back. Her expression was turned inward, blank, but every so often she jerked her shoulders or tossed her head or blew a hard breath out of her nostrils, like a racehorse waiting for the starting gun.

Vilholm was nowhere to be seen. He'd ranged ahead, amazingly soft-footed for such a big man, scouting out our path for us.

After what seemed like forever, Bazkas finally stopped and held up his hand.

We trickled to a halt.

"Close enough. Let's not tempt you-know-who," the dwarf said, his voice low. Not that we needed the warning. No Windwalker with half a brain would ever draw Beshaba's attention by saying her name out loud. A long time ago, up in that great big soap opera in the sky, she'd tried to get Shaundakul into bed with her. He'd turned her down. Then, in what may have been one of the dumbest horndog moves in divine history, he'd slept with her sister, Tymora, instead. She'd held a red hot grudge against him ever since, and she didn't need a reason to do his followers harm – just an excuse. "Zig," Baz went on. "Do your thing."

The Gur woman nodded. She stepped towards me, hand outstretched. "Are you ready?" she asked me.

 _Not particularly,_ I thought, but I nodded. "Yeah," I said curtly.

Her fingertips brushed my forehead. "Rider of the Sky, cast your shadow here," she murmured. "Hide this, your daughter, from the eyes of her enemies."

I didn't feel the power before it hit me, but when it did, I felt every particle of it sink into my skin, rippling like cool water.

I shivered and looked down, holding my arms out in front of me. I couldn't see them.

Zigana had moved on. Her fingers brushed the back of Tarn's shoulders. "Rider of the Sky, cast your shadow here," I heard her chant. "Hide this, your son, from the eyes of his enemies."

She repeated her prayer twice more, first for Baz and then for Mags, though for Mags she omitted the daughter part. It wouldn't have been true, and in any case Tempos might have complained about having one of his people poached by some pissant vagrant from Myth Drannor.

Once we were all out of sight, Baz's voice ghosted in from somewhere to my left. "All right," he said. His voice drifted away. "You all know what to do. Let's move."

Clothes rustled. Leather creaked. Footsteps crunched.

Soon enough, I was alone.

Well…almost.

A shadow melted out from the trees.

It was Atuar, cloaked from head to toe and, until he moved, almost indistinguishable from the other shadows except for the inky glimmer of his eyes.

He padded cautiously towards me. "Where are you?" he asked softly.

I scuffed my boot so he could hear it. "Here," I said softly.

He nodded. His sickle flashed as he beckoned. "Let's go."

I nodded. "One second," I murmured. I stepped up onto the mossy embankment just off the road and looked back, drawing a breath. A hook of thought drew my god's power up from its place beneath my heart.

My next exhalation released it.

A whisper of wind blew low across the ground. Where it passed, it lifted dead leaves into the air and whisked up whorls of dust. Gravel rolled a little, then went still.

When it was done, the way behind us was as blank and trackless as if we'd never passed this way.

I turned. "Go," I said softly.

Together, we left the road and ran into the trees.

Atuar ran noiselessly. I didn't. Still, if we picked the right path, my total inability to move without jingling, cursing, or tripping over unexpected tree roots wouldn't be much of an issue. I hoped.

Some of the trees we passed had a new feature, seldom found in the wild. They were marked with two lines of white paint, joined at the bottom to form a V shape. They marked the northern and eastern sides of the trees, and they'd been marked so that, from one, you could easily sight the next in line. Vilholm had obviously been busy with his little can of paint.

Following the path he'd sketched out for us, we eventually came across a body. From where it was lying, I guessed that it was one of the sentries our captive had spilled the beans about. Or had been, anyway. His face was purple, pop-eyed, and a white mark stood out across the swollen flesh of his throat. The now ex-sentry was wearing splint mail, but that hadn't done him much good against the garroting.

I leaned closer. The line on his neck was pretty thin but hadn't cut into the skin very hard. It hadn't been a hard, sharp wire that'd done him in, then. It had been something softer, more like a cord.I remembered the silk cord on Zigana's belt, and wondered about the nature of those many things she'd done in the past which hadn't made her proud, and those mistakes she had asked Shaundakul for a chance to atone for. Not that it mattered now – he was a god and seemed to have the uncanny ability to peer straight into your soul, so the fact that he'd accepted her offer of service told me she was probably on the up-and-up - but still. Inquiring minds wanted to know.

We moved on. A low-hanging branch loomed in front of me. Without thinking, I flicked my quarterstaff at it to knock it aside.

I'd never noticed that broken branches made _that_ much noise, but somehow the snapping of that branch was as loud as a gunshot.

Branches rustled. A voice, startled and rough with suspicion, called out. "Who goes there?" it demanded.

My heart skipped a beat. _Shit. Shit, shit, shit._

A figure crashed out of the undergrowth. He was wearing some kind of splint mail, too, and he had his sword out, and _boy_ did he look pissed.

I held very still, trying not to breathe. My eyes rolled down to where my hands were. _Still invisible. Good._ I never really knew what would break a spell of invisibility and what wouldn't. It occurred to me that maybe it might be a good idea to find out.

The man took a couple of steps forward, his sword waving ahead of him cautiously. "Who goes?" he said. He stopped near a weeping beech, his eyes combing the shadows.

In that stretch of silence, a silvery crescent of metal shot from between the branches and hooked around his throat like a jaguar's claw.

There was a yank. The man's body jerked. Bright red blood sheeted over the bright silver metal. It pattered to the ground in a short, sharp rain.

The man himself didn't make a noise. I was grateful for that.

Atuar, visible now, took his sickle away and let the body crumple. "Are you unharmed?" he asked.

I tore my eyes away from the dead man and ran a mental inventory. _Arms, check. Legs, check. Head, check._ That seemed to cover all of the important parts. "Yeah," I said after a second. I glanced down at the body and away. "I'm fine."

"Good." Atuar cocked his head, as if listening. His eyes scanned the empty air near me, then came to rest uncannily close to where I actually was standing. "That was all of them, I think."

"Uh. Good." I took a deep breath. Then I froze. Something underneath Atuar's cloak was moving. It was making a dry sort of rasping noise. "Uh," I said. "Atuar?"

"Yes?"

"You don't have Akris on you, do you?"

He looked up at the sky thoughtfully. "Would it make you feel better if I said no?" he asked.

I mulled that over. "Yeah," I said at last. "It would. It really would."

"Ah." The Chultan smiled. "Well, in that case, the answer is no," he said, and turned away to clean the blood from his sickle.

I stared at his back. _What do you know?_ All of that talking to trees hadn't ruined his sense of humor after all.

The sun was setting when we found the western side of the bandit's camp.

The camp was hemmed in by a strip of seriously overgrown forest. I'd seldom seen such a wall of vegetation outside of Chult. From the look on Atuar's face, neither had he. He didn't say as much, though. We could hear voices, now. They made enough noise to cover even my footsteps, but I still stepped as carefully as I could. Like Baz had said, there was no sense in tempting _you-know-who_.

Atuar and I picked our way through the undergrowth to the last marker. Vilholm's trademark V had been painted onto the side of a tree that overlooked a slight gap in the vegetation. The crunch of footsteps, murmur of voices, and clink of dishes floating through from the other side. Something was cooking on the fire. My stomach rumbled. It'd been a long time since lunch.

Atuar and I sidled up to the gap and peered through.

It would have been nice if the camp was a mess and the whole band was lying around drunk, but that wasn't the case. Some were catnapping, but others moved around, tending campfires or weapons or just drinking and talking. Low tents had been set up. I couldn't see if there were people inside or not.

Five or six men were congregated near our side of camp. Two or three were on the north side, near a gap in the trees. Three of four were on the east, maybe because it was nearest the road. Another few loitered on the south side, near another gap. Altogether, there seemed to be a little over a dozen.

There were people in the middle of the camp, less than a dozen, mostly adults and a couple children. They weren't bandits. They were dirty. From what I could see, they not only had their hands tied behind their back, but they'd also been tied together so that none of them could really move far without dragging the rest along. Some looked hurt, and every one of them had that still, shrinking look of people who were hoping really, really hard that if they just kept quiet and did what they were told, everything might still turn out okay.

Voices drifted past. A man drew a whetstone along a blade. Somewhere, a woman began to sing quietly, until one of the men in the camp screamed at her to shut up.

Then, somewhere else, so faintly that I wasn't even sure I'd heard anything at all, I thought I heard the sharp twang of a bowstring.

I looked up. A bright bead of light, like a falling star in reverse and visible even in the fading daylight, shot into the sky.

As if in response to it, the musical rattle and thump of a tambourine began to play in the distance.

 _That's our signal._

I twisted in place, reaching out. From the corner of my eye, I saw Atuar doing the same thing. Leaves rustled beneath my outstretched hands. The reassuring scent of green and growing things filled my nostrils.

By my side, Atuar was speaking, his voice pitched low, chanting a prayer. I didn't listen. It wasn't meant for my ears.

I didn't chant. For reasons I'd never been able to fathom, Shaundakul'd never made me ask for his power. He'd just dropped it in my lap and left me to figure out what to do with it.

Now, my power whispered. Beneath my fingers, something seemed to wake, a warm and seeking thing that twisted blindly towards the tiny sun Shaundakul had lodged somewhere beneath my heart.

Softly, creakingly, as if trying to remember the steps of a dance they hadn't done in years, the plants began to move.

At the edge of the camp, a tendril of bindvine began to snake slowly across the dirt, its winter-blasted bark crackling. It was followed by others – the thin green arms of bitter melon and morning glory creeping over the thick, groaning branches of an old wisteria, which groped after them, shedding the remnants of last year's flowers as it went, and all around them the friendly little trefoil vines of poison ivy dove up and dug in and then rose up again through the loose loam, easily outpacing their slower-growing cousins.

The ivy reached the ankle of the nearest man and paused. A bright green feeler prodded his boot, almost experimentally. Then, as if it had just come to a decision, the ivy leapt upwards and twined itself around the man's ankles.

The man looked down abruptly. "Wha-" he started to say.

The roll of the tambourine stopped. "Hold!" a woman's voice cried, and a _whoomph_ of sound that wasn't sound, sound so deep that it resonated in the blood more than the ears, drowned out the rest.

More men started to shout. Two of them, on the far side of the camp where the sonic boom had been the loudest, went down, clutching at their ears and howling like they'd just rediscovered their vocal cords. Another pair staggered, but didn't fall. They were already recovering and going for the weapons. Men started rolling out of the tents, some of them with pants half-up or shirts half-off but all of them with weapons already in hand. That brought their numbers up a little higher than I'd thought, making them outnumber us by a little more than two-to-one.

 _Too late to worry about that._ Other men were scrambling for swords and fitting arrows to bowstrings. Another two seconds, and those arrows would start flying. Power surged in my throat, and I hissed a word, hardly hearing what I said.

Vines lashed out in a blind, vegetative fury, latching on to anything in reach. One swordsman found his arm tethered to the ground in mid-draw. Another found himself playing tug-of-war with a growth of wisteria, trying to get his bow back from the grasping vine. Two trunks of bindvine climbed another man's legs. Cursing, he tried to beat them back even as new leaves unfurled and new growth surged up to twine around every part of him it could reach.

On the far side of the camp, a tall figure moved out of the trees, flanked by a much smaller one. "I said _hold_ , damn your eyes," the figure spat, and moved into view. Light shone along the length of bared steel in its hands. "And if I see any of you whoresons make a move for his weapon, I swear by Tempos himself that what's left of you won't be fit for the dogs."

At those words, a stillness fell, knife-edged and tense.

Magda stepped into it. The Uthgardt had Stormsplinter in her hands and Zigana at her heels. The tiny Gur woman held her tambourine in one hand and her knife in the other, and her eyes glittered like a raven's.

The first of the bandits to move was a slim, dark-haired man with calculating eyes. He stepped over one of his fallen colleagues. Casually, he booted the guy in the ribs as he passed, then raised his voice over the man's groans. "Stand down!" he bellowed. Some of the men obeyed. Others hesitated. "Gods damn it! Down, I said! Either you sheathe those bloody swords or by Cyric's eyeteeth I'll sheathe them so far up your arses I'll tickle your bloody tonsils!" He turned to Magda. That gave me a good view of his back, and of the heavy axe slung across it, though he didn't seem inclined to use it. At least, not right away. "What happened to my sentries?" he asked her abruptly.

She looked him up and down, measuring. "Oh," she said. She lifted a foot and examined it briefly. "Was that what Magda stepped in? I though I felt something soft."

The man's eyebrows shot up. "You killed all of them?" he asked skeptically.

The Uthgardt shrugged and lowered her foot. "I do not know," she said indifferently. "Call your watchers in, if you care to, and we will count heads." Her grin widened. "We may even count the bodies, too. If you are good and do not try any funny business. You seem like a man who thinks he is funny. Is that so?"

The man was quiet. He seemed to be thinking. If I had to guess, he was thinking about the best response to an ambush that was being spearheaded by an Uthgardt woman who handled a sword like she knew how to use it and apparently had one of his sentries all over her boots. It seemed like the kind of thing I'd be thinking about really, really hard, if I were in his position. "Madam, in this moment, I can assure you that I have no sense of humor at all," he said at last, and spread his hands. I couldn't see his face, but his voice was as smooth as ice. "Very well. You seem to have me at a disadvantage. What do you want?"

Magda leaned on her sword. "You have hostages," she said. "Free them."

"And then?"

"And then?" The Uthgardt flexed her fingers on her greatsword's hilt. "Then you get to live."

The man chuckled. "You propose to rob me of my reward, after all I have done to earn it? And then you will leave me with nothing in return?" he asked. "Come, now. That would be unkind in the extreme."

Magda's eyes narrowed. "Magda has already done you far more honor than you deserve," she growled. "Do not push me."

"Is that so? Tell me. Do you truly care to fight?" The man glanced around. "Your numbers do not match ours, even if you have ten times as many hidden in the woods back there. Do you? No matter. You are few. Why run the risk of a confrontation?"

Magda drew herself up, her nostrils flaring, and Zigana stepped forward to catch her sleeve. The Gur had her tambourine – and her little silken cord - back at her belt. Her lips were curved in a friendly smile. It didn't quite counteract Magda's expression of barely-suppressed homicidal rage, but it did help take the edge off. A little. "Do I take this to mean that you would like to offer an alternative, good master?" Zig interjected mildly.

The apparent leader shifted his attention to her. "Hah. First the stick, and now the carrot?" he asked drily. Then, hands still outspread, he jerked a short bow. "Very well," he said abruptly. "My alternative is this: pay my ransom, and I will allow you to leave with the captives."

Zigana arched an eyebrow. Carefully, she slid her knife into its sheath, though she didn't take her hand off of its hilt. "So easy as that?" she murmured. Her tone said she wasn't buying it.

The man shrugged. "Gold is gold," he said indifferently. Then he laughed. "As a matter of fact, you would be doing me a favor," he added with apparent frankness. "I would not be obliged to wait through negotiations."

Zigana nodded, her smile sweet and eyes sharp. "I see," she said. "And what would this service cost us?"

The man named a number with lots of zeroes in it. I saw the men in the camp shift, a sudden change coming over them. Before, they'd been nervous – ready to fight but caught off guard, defensive. Now, they were still ready to fight, but they'd had time to catch their breath and do a head count. Some of them had started to smile. Except for the guys Atuar and I had bundled from head to toe in poison ivy, for some reason. Those guys didn't seem to be smiling _at all_.

Magda's nostrils flared. She seemed to be grinding her teeth. "I should kill you for that alone," she breathed.

Zigana's grip on the Uthgardt's sleeve tightened. "What my friend meant to say," she said smoothly, "-is that such a price is beyond our humble means."

The man was quiet for a long moment. "Did she? All right," he said at last. "If you will not pay, perhaps we can reach some other accommodation."

Zigana's expression didn't change. I had to hand it to her: the woman knew how to bluff. "What do you propose?" she asked.

The man answered promptly. "Hold your weapons and bide until the ransoms are paid, and I will grant you a cut."

Zig cocked her head. "Actually, I regret to inform you that you might find the ransoms harder to obtain than you hoped," she corrected politely. "As you may or may not have heard, Waterdeep is under attack and has called a quarantine."

The man laughed shortly. "Irrelevant," he scoffed. "There is always a way in. And there is always a way out."

"Perhaps. But the forces of the city are well occupied. Do you gamble that you will be able to gain their attention? And, if you do, that the city's coffers can afford ransom when all its coin is needed for swords?" She paused, and lowered her eyes, looking at him from beneath her lashes. "And, while you must understand that I make no accusations," she added, her tone suggesting that she was embarrassed even to bring the subject up, "I cannot help but fear that you may slip away before our deal is concluded and leave me with neither gold nor hostages." She raised her hands helplessly. "You can understand my position."

The man's voice held the notes of a wheedling smile. "Trust is oft rewarded."

Zigana's own smile didn't budge. "And just as often punished," she replied. Something in her voice told me that she knew what she was talking about, and she hadn't learned it from hearsay.

From the sound of his next words, the bandit leader had just about lost his patience. "Fine," he said shortly. "What do you propose, then?"

The Gur wasted no time in answering. "An immediate exchange."

"Of what?"

"Of those people. For your lives."

Thoughtfully, the man clasped his hands behind his back. "In that case," he said. "I propose an alternative."

Zig eyed him pensively, her head to one side. "I am listening."

"You may be right about the ransom, but these folk are well-off on their own. We get rid of them, take what they have, call it our profit for this endeavor, and I give you a portion of my own cut." At a mutter from his men, the leader held one hand up. The mutter died down. "I would not deprive my men of their hard-earned gold," he said, "But perhaps a few hundred of mine might persuade you to lay this folly down."

"A few hundred? A pittance."

"When combined with your lives?" The man laughed, his voice almost jocular. "Come. Be reasonable, my good woman."

"And if we do not comply?"

At a gesture from their leader, the men straightened. The two men who'd been crouched nearest Magda slowly pushed themselves to their feet. Steel rattled. Bows pulled taut. And the dark-haired man stood in the middle of it all, his hands clasped calmly behind his back. "Then I regret to say that cannot let you leave," he answered. "Neither with your lives, nor with our booty."

Zigana nodded, as if he'd just told her that the sky was blue or that halflings were short. "Ah, well," she said lightly, to no one in particular. "I tried." Then she stepped back and reached for her knife.

That was when a whole lot of things seemed to happen at once.

Bowstrings twanged in all corners, and I heard the air-cutting _thwip_ of arrows, but before they'd quite finished humming I saw Mags spin Stormsplinter up from the ground, cat-fast, and swipe the nearest man's head clean off.

The head flew off in a fan of liquid red. As much as the guy still had any expression on his face, he looked surprised, but before I'd had a chance to do more than register that detail Magda had already spun, following the momentum of her own swing, and brought Stormsplinter back around in an arc that sent the second man's sword-arm to the ground at the elbow before biting into his side, just below his ribs. He folded around the sword, seeming too surprised to so much as scream. When she jerked it free, he dropped.

Behind her, Zig dropped into a fighting crouch and threw her knife before the first man had finished falling. It spun end over end, flashing silver. A few feet away from her, a man dropped to his knees, a hilt blooming from his belly, and in nearly the same instant a streak resolved itself into an arrow which reached the air in front of Zigana and Magda…

…then bounced off and buried itself in a clod of dirt about twenty feet away, as if it had been caught and flung by some unseen hand.

The bandit who'd shot the arrow turned to gawk. Zigana took the opportunity to pull another knife from her boot and throw it at him. He traded gawking at the arrow for gawking at the knife hilt suddenly sticking out of his stomach. Zig didn't stop to gawk. Almost as soon as the knife had left her hand, she was swinging up into the nearest tree to vanish within its branches.

There was movement on the south side of the trees. I turned my head to see a short, stocky-shouldered figure come out swinging, the sword in its hands shining with a blue-white glow. Even from this distance, I could feel the hum of power coming off of it, singing out to the same thing in me. Vilholm came in behind Baz, methodically putting arrows to bowstring, aiming, and letting fly. His longbow was slow on the draw, but when his arrows hit, they punched like javelins - and just like with Zig, the air seemed to churn around them, sending the bandits' arrows flying off the mark.

To the north, the bushes quivered and spat out Alaran, grinning like a cornered fox. His shortbow sang again and again, rapid-fire, and around him arrows went off-course or bounced away from him as if he was surrounded by a miniature cyclone, the same as with the others. I'd thought I'd seen his hands move fast when he juggled, but now they blurred, sending off one arrow after another after another to cover Tarn, who was advancing with sword in hand.

The old Windwalker didn't seem worried about his lack of armor. When an arrow hit his shoulder and shattered, I thought I saw why. His skin had gone gray and almost mottled, like a statue's, but he moved more smoothly than any statue, constantly in motion with his greatsword spinning in his hands in a way that was startlingly unlike Magda's technique for all that their weapons were alike. Both of them used two-handers, but Tarn's was slimmer, lighter, and instead of sweeping it in big, powerful arcs like Magda, his movements were tighter and more economical, with his sword held close to his body more often than not. As I watched, he caught one bandit's swing on his sword's crosspiece and in one motion he forced the other man's sword down and used the opportunity to kick the man's feet out from under him. A yank, a shift of his hands on the sword's long hilt, and a tight downward thrust ended the job.

Then an arrow zipped past my face, and I jerked back, remembering a little late that the show was ongoing and I was a member of the cast, not the audience. "Atuar!" I shouted. "Get the archers down!" The Chultan was already moving, diving towards the gap. Something heavy dropped from the folds of his cloak and into the underbrush with a hiss. I sucked in a breath and spun back to face the nearest archer. "You!" I bellowed, and leveled a finger at him. Power boiled off of my tongue. "Hold it right there, buddy!"

The man froze in place like he'd been caught in an invisible net. His eyes moved towards me. Then, as if drawn there on a string, they moved down.

Something was slithering through the broken vines. It was an iridescent green color, it was big, it was thick-bodied, and it moved an awful lot like the vines had, in a kind of high-speed undulation.

Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your point of view – this time it wasn't poison ivy.

Akris struck, rearing out of the scattered leaves and sinking his teeth into the man's thigh with the kind of the cold-blooded fury that only a twelve-foot boa constrictor recently interrupted from his nap could summon.

While Atuar's familiar-eating monster was busy making new friends, I jumped out of the bushes, summoning up a breath that made the blood flow through my veins like a chasing wind.

I didn't feel any faster. The rest of the world just seemed to slow down, and I moved through the drawn-out seconds, drawing my quarterstaff back for a swing at the first bandit I saw. He was facing away from me. Was he one of the guys who'd been laughing about that girl? I didn't know. I didn't stop. Silent Partner met his skull. The man spun and fell. There was a woman behind him, and I swung the butt of my staff up between her legs, then yanked it sideways to take her legs out. I felt something give with a sharp pop – probably a knee, if I had to guess. She began to drop, seeming to speed up as she went. I used the last of my chasing wind to knock her on the head, hop over her, and keep running, gathering air currents as I went and swirling them around me until I was wrapped in a cocoon of churning air.

The captives were still in their huddle, only now even more so, pressed in so close that they looked like one really fat man with a dozen heads. I skidded to a stop, then dropped to my knees in front of the nearest captive, dropped Silent Partner and yanked my belt knife out of its holster. "Hold out your hands," I snapped. I would have liked to sound gentle, but right then I didn't have it in me.

The captive was a girl – a young woman, I supposed, but now that I was just on the shady side of thirty anyone under twenty had started looking like a kid to me. She looked up at me warily, suspicion clear in her eyes. A dying scream from one of the bandits seemed to decide her. Her lips thinning, she thrust out her bound hands, not exactly hopeful but apparently willing to run the risk of trusting me for a chance at freedom.

I sliced through her ropes as quick as I could, then gave them a yank. They slithered free, and she was staggering to her feet, rubbing her wrists, but I couldn't pay her much attention because by then I had another pair of hands thrust in front of my nose, and then another, and another, and so on down the line. I cut and yanked, cut and yanked, and every so often I felt a slight twitch in my shield and saw an arrow get caught in the swirling wind around me and go spinning away again.

Eventually, I reached the end of the rope, jammed my knife back in its sheath, grabbed my quarterstaff, and stood. The captives all seemed to be up. Some were rummaging in the wagon. "All right," I began.

I didn't get any further than that. One of the women looked behind me. Her eyes widened. She pointed with one hand while groping in the wagon with the other. "Get down!" she shouted.

I didn't question the order. Nobody could fake looking _that_ freaked out.

I ducked.

A split second later, I heard a sound like a cast iron pan hitting someone's head, a groan, another clang, a crunch, and finally, a thud.

I hesitated for a second. Then, since nothing else seemed to be happening, I rose to a crouch and twisted around to look behind me.

One of the bandits was on the ground behind me. An axe lay on the ground near his outstretched hand. His face was a ruin of blood and bone.

I turned back to the captives. The woman who'd warned me was, in fact, holding an iron skillet – clutching it in both hands like it was a lifeline. It probably was. There was blood and hair on it and other things that didn't bear looking at too closely.

When I met the woman's eyes, she shrugged. "First thing that came to hand," she explained.

I opened my mouth a couple of times, then finally came out with, "I'm not complaining." I stood up, brushing myself off. "Thanks," I added.

She nodded. A quick, grim smile tightened her lips. "My pleasure," she said. Some of her wariness eased. She looked around. "Where to?"

I looked around. Fighting was still happening, but the immediate area was clear. "Stay close to me," I said. "If something happens to me…" I didn't want to think about that, but I kinda had to. "…head straight for that dwarf over there." Baz was up, uninjured, and between his throwing hammers and Vilholm's arrows, not to mention any divinely inspired tricks they had up their sleeves, they could probably cover a retreat. "He'll take care of you." Then I hoisted my staff, turned, and gestured forward. "Now run!"

They didn't waste time in obeying. People surged ahead of me, around me. I held back to bring up the rear, trying to keep myself and my shield of air between them and the bandits. It felt like it took a century, but it was probably just a minute or two until we made it to Baz.

The dwarf grounded his sword. It gave off a lambent blue light. "Everybody here?" he asked.

"Think so," I panted. I looked around and counted. "Yeah."

"Good. Everybody, around me." The refugees clustered without argument. Times like these, even the questionable refuge of a scarred dwarf with a face like a fist seemed like a better option than staying out there.

Baz nodded curtly. "I've got 'em, sister," he told me, and hoisted his sword, shooing people behind him. My skin tingled, and I felt the air shift to form another wall. "Go do what you must."

"Right," I said, relieved. The captives were in good hands. I could stop worrying. Well, no – I couldn't. But I could stop worrying about _them_ , at least.

Then, before I could think better of it, I spun and ran back out into the fray. I glanced up at the sky as I ran, then took a look at the field and shook my head. _Too risky,_ I thought. I'd be as likely to hit friend as foe.

Magda had closed with the leader but she was having a hard time of it. He caught her sword on the downswing with the hooked blade of his axe and forced it down. Mags retaliated by kicking him in the stomach, which sent him stumbling backwards, but there was another man sneaking up around a tree just behind her, and I drew breath to shout…

…then I let my breath out again as Zigana appeared, hanging upside-down by her knees from one of the tree's branches, and looped her cord around the guy's neck. Then she flung herself up again, cord in hand, and dropped to the ground on the opposite side of the branch, using her own body as a counterweight to yank her victim off his feet. He went up, choking and kicking and clawing at the noose suddenly tightening around his neck.

Magda was still intent on her opponent, who'd regained his feet. As I watched, he suddenly dropped to the ground, making her next swing pass above his head. She pulled back, off balance and spitting curses, trying to gain a little ground before he rolled back to his feet and came after her again, and more were coming with him, the last men standing fighting with renewed desperation. She was forced back further as they came, and Zigana was there but she only had one dagger left and it wasn't going to be enough.

A sudden wash of dizziness and a ringing in my ears made me stumble on my way to her. For a second I thought I'd gotten hit in the head. Then the ground _heaved_. I staggered to a stop. _Tarn,_ I thought, and shot a glance to where he stood, both hands on the hilt of his greatsword with its point driven deep into the ground.

The earth heaved up like a boat crashing into a tall wave.

Then it split down the middle of the camp, starting where the point of the old priest's sword had struck the earth and cracking open in rapid-fire zig-zags all the way from there to the ground under the bandit leader's feet.

It was almost funny, in a horrible black way, how suddenly it stopped, how he looked down to see the ground opening under his feet and he fell, arms windmilling, and then Magda swung and then his confusion was made permanent 'cause his head suddenly wasn't attached to his shoulders anymore.

The rest of the bandits stared, stunned, and in moments it was over, flashes of red and thuds of butchery as my friends took advantage of the confusion, and in the sudden ringing silence I knelt, sucking in the air and listening to my heart beat like a drum and thinking, _thank god, thank god, thank god._


	7. Doves

_Love is in the water  
_ _Love is in the air  
_ _Show me where to look  
_ _Tell me will love be there  
_ _Teach me how to speak  
_ _Teach me how to share  
_ _Teach me where to go  
_ _Tell me will love be there  
_ _Oh, heaven let your light shine down_

\- Collective Soul, "Shin _e"_

 _~*~  
_ Chapter 7: Doves  
~*~

I wandered through the grounds of the wayshrine, Silent Partner tap-tapping a jittery beat against the loam. Bloody images flashed through my head.

We'd buried the bandits in a mass grave, taking advantage of the great big hole in the ground that Kelavir's quake had opened up. He and Atuar had said a few pious words before we'd shoveled the dirt in. Baz had spat into the grave.

The rest of us had salvaged what supplies we could, loaded it all onto the bandits' wagons along with the refugees, hitched up the horses, and then we'd all gotten the hell away from that place and its blood/shit/smoke stink.

Most of the former hostages had collapsed on arrival and were still asleep, wrapped in whatever blankets we could find. A few were awake – the injured, mostly, ones who hadn't been hurt badly enough to need immediate attention but whose injuries needed seeing to now that we were safe. They were clustered under the birch, where the not-so-honorable Bazkas sat on an old stool, presiding.

The dwarf's current patient was a woman with short blonde hair and her arm in a ratty sling. I stopped and watched as Baz's fingers prodded gently at the woman's arm, working their way up from her wrist and back down again. His eyes had an odd look, focused yet not, not so much looking at her as _through_ her, right down beneath the skin.

Eventually, Baz blinked. His eyes refocused. His thick fingers held the woman's elbow in place while his other hand moved her forearm back and forth and up and down. "How's that feel?" he asked. "You should be able to move it free now, aye?"

The woman tried. Surprise flitted over her face. "I can," she said. She looked down at her arm and flexed it again, experimentally. "Why, it hardly hurts." She looked up. "Is it-"

"Healed?" Baz finished. He balled up the sling and threw it over his shoulder. "Well, the bone's set and knitted, but don't you go running off and getting into any fights now, y'hear me?" He shook a finger at her and turned to one side, where a basin of water sat on another stool, steaming. "The rest of the healing needs to happen slow and natural if y'want it to heal right. Give it two tendays before y'try lifting anything heavier than a quarter keg, and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, send 'em to me and I'll set 'em straight."

The woman smiled, a little shakily. "I will." She hesitated. "Thank you, Windwalker."

Baz snorted and waved a hand at her. "Ach. Be off with ya now, woman," he growled. As she ducked her head and stepped away, he fished the soap out of the basin and began lathering his hands. "Oy, hair-for-brains," he called over to me without looking up. "You seen that idiot Tarn anywhere?"

"Not since we got back, no. Why?"

"Why?" Baz dropped the soap back in the basin, sending droplets of sudsy water everywhere. "Because I practically had to carry him back here, that's why, and I'm still waitin' to have words with him about that. Idiot should know he can't ride all night, fight the next day, and then raise a quake like that. Not at his age."

"He's younger than you are, Baz."

"He's human. You humans get old fast." The dwarf reached for a towel, scowling. "Sometimes it feels like all I have to do is turn around twice and you're cockin' up your toes."

"Thanks so much for reminding me, Baz. It's not like it doesn't cross my mind at least six times a day anyway."

He grunted and gave me a sidelong look as he dried his hands on his towel. "Listen," he said, after a long pause. "I wanted t'apologize-"

I cut him off. "Don't," I said. "You were right. Had to be done, and it was quicker that way."

"Aye, but you shouldn't have had to do it," the dwarf said. His voice sounded tired. "You'd think that with my soul as black as it is, I'd be the pain-dealer and you'd be the healer."

I didn't want to talk about this any more. "Yeah, well, you're not, and I'm not."

The dwarf slung his towel over his shoulder. "True enough," he said. Then he turned to his next patient and jumped in apparent surprise. "Holy Hells, would you look at that!" he exclaimed. In front of him, a kid that can't have been more than six or seven clung to a woman's hand, half-hidden behind her hip. "Child, you might just be the ugliest creature I've ever laid eyes on," Baz went on expansively, resting his hands on his knees. "Are you even human, or did somebody smuggle a gnoll in here while I wasn't looking?"

Warily, the kid peeked out from behind his mom's - or aunt's, or neighbor's, or whoever she was to him or he to her - leg. He had a dirty face, fat cheeks, a pug nose, and blondish hair that was matted with blood all along one side of his head. "'m human," he mumbled, after a long pause.

"Human, eh? Hah!" Baz barked a laugh. "What are you, then, a human boy or a human girl? I can't rightly tell." The kid mumbled something. "A boy, eh? Well, thank the gods for some small mercies. So what's your name, boy?" The kid giggled nervously and mumbled something else. "Trevor? All right, Ugly Trevor. You don't mind if I call you Ugly Trevor, do you?" A shy shake of the head answered him. "Right. Didn't think so. Why, I'll bet that with a face like that, you've been in all kinds of fights. A few bruises are nothin' new to you, am I right?"

The boy stared up at Baz owlishly, as if not quite sure what to make of him. "I bit the big man," he said uncertainly. Just as uncertainly, he looked down at his hand. "On the hand," he added. Then he raised a hand to his temple, where a bruise bloomed in nightmare colors. "He hit me."

Baz glanced at the bruise expressionlessly. "Well, he won't be doin' that again," he said. His grin belonged on a 'Wanted' poster. "Not without a head."

The boy looked at Baz, then up at me. "You cut his head off?" he asked hopefully.

"I didn't," I said. "But my friend Magda did."

The boy mulled that over. "And he's dead?" he asked.

I remembered the red spray, and the shearing sound of metal cutting through bone. I had to swallow before I spoke. "Dead as a doornail," I reassured him.

The boy mulled that over, too. "Good," he said at last.

Baz grinned. "That's the spirit," he complimented Trevor. "Now, let's take a look at that cut on your head and see if we can't keep you from getting any uglier than y'already are, eh?" The boy giggled his assent, and turned his head obediently. When I turned away, the dwarf was already parting the boy's bloody hair with gentle fingers, which was a neat trick for somebody with arms like a gorilla.

I left Baz to his work and wandered on, feeling useless.

Nearby, I smelled smoke. Alaran was crouched over a firepit that had been dug a little ways from the cabin. He was whistling something complicated and southern-sounding as he poked at the fire, trying to get it to come back to life after being left to go down to embers overnight.

I glanced around again. People were stirring. It dawned on me that these folks probably weren't going to be up to leaving today. That meant they'd need something to eat soon, only I and everyone else would be damned if I did the cooking, and everyone else seemed busy.

Well – almost everyone. I looked at the half-elf again and started smiling. Then I moseyed on over. "Hey, Al," I greeted the half-elf. "I've got a question for you."

His face was wrinkled up in concentration as he tried to coax a dead branch to catch fire. It didn't seem to be taking. "Hmm?"

"If you had to feed about two dozen people, how would you do it?"

The half-elf blinked. His forehead crinkled in thought. "Well," he said. "If we were back home, I'd catch a few juicy rats and stew 'em."

"I said feed people, Al, not kill them."

He pouted. "Well, rats not bein' available, I suppose I'd go ask Vilholm to shoot me a few rabbits. Maybe some squirrels. You can get a lot of stew out of those if you do it right, though I'd be happier for some potatoes." He rubbed his stomach. "You can stretch a stew for miles with potatoes."

I clapped him on the shoulder. "Sounds great," I said, and turned away. "You get started on that, and I'll tell Vilholm to find you some rabbits."

It didn't take long for that to sink in. "I...wait, _what_?"

I grinned like a headsman with a shiny new axe. "Congratulations, Al," I said. "You're our chef for today." I drummed my fingers on my quarterstaff's haft. "I wonder. Do we still have those potatoes in the cellar, or did Baz eat them all?"

Alaran gaped at me. "But…but I can't cook for all these people!" he protested, his voice high. "I haven't even got the fire going again! _And_ I have no pots."

I shrugged. "Don't worry," I said. "I'll tell Atuar to help you. If he can light a fire in a jungle, he can light a fire anywhere. And I'm sure there are pots in those supplies we took." I patted his shoulder. "I'll be right back with those potatoes."

Voices were floating around near the cabin. One was Atuar's voice, and the other belonged to a woman that I didn't recognize.

I was near the door when I heard a gasp and a giggle. "It's so big!" the woman exclaimed. "And so long! I've never seen its like. Is it real?"

I stopped, blinking. I looked blankly at Silent Partner for a second. The mithril end cap gleamed back just as blankly.

Then, squinting in case I had to close my eyes really fast, I peeked around the corner of the cabin.

Atuar was standing in the flat, open area near the cabin, where he and a dark-haired woman were digging through the wagons we'd brought back with us. The woman looked about thirtyish, a little bruised but with a lopsided grin and piercing grey eyes that that said it would take a lot more than bruises to keep her down for long.

The woman seemed to be taking a break from her work to admire Akris, whom Atuar held draped around his shoulders like a really creepy scarf. Akris regarded her with hooded eyes, his tongue occasionally flicking out to taste the air. It was impossible to tell what he thought about the attention. Maybe he was a little tired after crushing a grown man, or maybe he was only putting up with it because he thought there might be another mage's familiar in the deal. Who knew? Who cared? He was a snake.

In any case, I didn't think it was Akris the woman wanted. Not with the way she was suggestively stroking his nose and smiling at his owner. "You're quite the oddity," the woman was saying as I walked up to them. "That's to say, we don't see many Chultans around here."

The Chultan blinked. "I…what? An oddity?" he repeated. He paused, thinking. Then he laughed. "I suppose I am, at that," he conceded. "Certainly I was born under an unlucky star."

The woman arched an eyebrow, smiling. "Unlucky in what way?"

Thoughtfully, Atuar stroked his snake's scaled hide. Akris blinked, slowly. I wondered if he was still digesting that other guy's familiar. "Well, you see, the tribes of Chult take the stars very seriously," Atuar explained. "When the stars say a child will grow to be a great warrior, the child is taught the ways of war. When the stars say a child will grow to be wise, the child is taught the ways of wisdom."

"And when the stars say a child will grow to be unlucky?" the woman asked.

"The child is tied to a branch of the agouma tree and left for the snakes to eat."

The dark-haired woman snorted a laugh. "You're right," she agreed. "That's not lucky at _all_."

"It is if you're a snake," I said, deadpan. The woman laughed again.

Atuar smiled and shrugged. "Well, fortunately for me, I was not eaten by snakes," he said. "Instead, I was found by a man. He was of no tribe, as I was, and he did not trust the stars - though he did trust the birds, and the jungle cats, and the snakes and the lizards and the trees." His smile turned reminiscent, then sad. "But he was old when he found me, and in time, he went the way of all living things. I gave him to the beasts of the jungle, as he would have wished. Then, since he had told me many stories of the rest of the world and I was curious to see these places for myself, I left. It was on the Mistcliffs that I found one of Shaundakul's shrines, and the sight struck me so that I decided I would pray to the god for whom it had been raised." He shrugged. "He appeared to me, accepting my prayers and calling me to the Northlands to serve him. I followed his call, and in the North I have remained."

The woman's smile didn't fade. "And a good thing, too," she said. "Or else we'd be goners." She nodded at me. "Lady Windwalker," she said.

I nodded at the woman. "Sorry for the interruption," I said easily. "You mind if I borrow Atuar for a second?"

Atuar smiled at me in his sweet, vaguely spacey way. "Rebecca," he greeted me. "Do you need something?"

I scratched the palm of my left hand. I hoped I hadn't stuck my hand in poison ivy or anything. It really itched. "I was looking for Vilholm," I said. "Have you seen him around?"

"I think he is with the horses we saved from the bandits," Atuar answered. "Several of them were very upset. They had not been treated well. Vilholm thought he might try talking to them."

I blinked. "Sorry," I said. "Did I just hear you say the words 'Vilholm' and 'talking' in the same sentence?"

"Yes." A glimmer of a smile appeared on Atuar's dark face. "I asked him if he was feeling unwell."

"Did he answer?"

"No, he did not."

"Oh. Well, in that case, he's probably fine." I half-turned to go. I paused. "Oh, right. I almost forgot. When you have a minute, why don't you go see if Alaran needs a hand? He's cooking today, and I think he needs some help."

The Chultan nodded. "Gladly," he said. He smiled at me, his amber eyes warm. "Not to worry. Alaran and I will ensure that our guests are well fed."

The woman cocked her head at me. "Mind if I help?" she asked. "I'm a decent cook, myself – and, to tell you truly, if I don't find something to do, I think I'll just set down and scream my head off."

I knew the feeling, although I had the sneaking suspicion that it wasn't lunch she really wanted to do. "Hey, the more, the merrier," I said, and stuck out a hand. "Sorry. I don't think I introduced myself. I'm Rebecca."

The woman clasped my hand. Up close, what I'd taken for dirty nails were actually stained with a random mix of colors. "Alys. Alys Cartwright. Of the Weaver's guild, and if that doesn't confuse you enough, I'm actually a Dyer. Though, hah, not dead, thanks to you lot." Her lopsided grin came into full play. "Sorry. Just a little Dyer humor."

I laughed. "Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Alys the Dyer," I said. "I'd stay to chat, but first I need to go see a man about some rabbits, or else we won't be eating lunch. See you two later?" They both nodded and waved me on, and I followed the sound of nickering and the faint smell of horse shit to my next target.

I found Vilholm sitting cross-legged in front of the horses' picket line. As far as I could tell, he wasn't doing anything else. Just sitting.

The horses had come from the bandit camp, and the last I'd seen of them, they'd been rolling their eyes and stamping and whickering in a way that said they were one, "Boo!" away from stampeding.

Now, they were all calm, and all of them were staring at Vilholm.

One horse, a rangy chestnut, leaned over to nose the man's shoulder affectionately. He patted its velvety nose, but otherwise didn't move a muscle.

 _Okay,_ I thought. _Now_ that's _creepy._ I crouched down nearby, close enough that I was sure he knew I was there but not close enough to intrude on his personal space. "Hey," I said, my voice pitched low. I kept half an eye on the horses. I wasn't a horse whisperer like Vilholm. I didn't want to spook them and get my ass trampled.

He turned his head slightly, acknowledging me with a flick of his calm grey eyes and a murmured, "Rebecca."

I nodded towards the horses. "How are they doing?"

"Better."

"Good enough that they can be left alone for a while?"

He considered that. "Aye," he said, after a brief pause. "If there's need."

"There's need. We have a lot of hungry people and no meat. Could you find us some rabbits or something? Plus whatever else you can find that's edible and can go in a stew."

He considered that, too. Then he nodded and stood. "Aye."

"Good." I stood up, too. My knees creaked. "Bring whatever you find to Alaran. He's in charge of the food."

Vilholm's forehead wrinkled, as if I had said something he couldn't quite make sense of. "Alaran?"

"Yeah."

"How did that happen?"

I grinned. "I talked faster than he could argue."

If he weren't about twice my age and didn't have a beard you could hide a halfling in, Vilholm's soft, husky laugh might have made me rethink my ban on dating coworkers. "Nice," he said drily. He adjusted his quiver and slipped his bow back over his shoulder. "Give me a candlemark."

"Sounds good." I squeezed his shoulder. "Thanks, man. I owe you."

He smiled his quiet smile. "Just doing my job," he said. Then he walked away, his boots hardly making a sound.

I watched him go, pensive. A curl of smoke back the way I'd come said the cooking fire was coming along okay. So far, so good. I was on a problem-solving roll today. I supposed I could say I'd done enough, call it a day, and catch forty winks, but I was afraid, like Alys, that if I sat down and started thinking I'd just start screaming and not stop until someone gave me either a stiff drink or a quick punch to the head.

 _Potatoes_ , I thought then. _Potatoes are safe. Let's think about potatoes._

I'd last seen some in the cabin cellar. I headed back and eased the front door open. The hinges shrieked like a dying banshee.

I stepped in and blinked, my eyes adjusting to the dim light. "Oh," I said. " _There_ you are." I took another step in and let the door close behind me. "I was kinda wondering."

A faint, genteel drawl drifted across the darkened room. "I _detest_ that door," it said fervently, or at least as fervently as you could say anything in that kind of my-head's-about-to-fall-off whisper.

I snorted. "Don't be so dramatic," I said. I crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the cot, where Tarn was stretched out on the scratchy coverlet. He had a cloth pressed to his forehead, his eyes closed, and his lanky shins dangling off the edge of the too-short bed. He didn't seem too inclined to move. "I was wondering where you'd gone," I went on. "Baz was looking for you."

"Mm-hmm."

"Seems he wanted to yell at you. He's pretty angry about you wearing yourself out to raise that quake."

Kelavir lifted his compress. He stared at the ceiling. "Strange," he murmured.

"What's that?"

"I was just struck by a strong urge to take a very long walk."

"Where to?"

"Oh, I do not know. How is the weather in Kara-tur this time of year?" At my laugh, he smiled a little and levered himself up onto one elbow. "And you?" he asked, sounding a little more like his normal self. "How are you, dear girl?"

My armor jingled as I patted at it. "Nobody's poked any new holes in me," I said. "So I'd say I got through fine." I couldn't say that about the other guys, but it was best not to think about that too much. Done was done, and at least we had some living townsfolk to show for it. "How are you?" I asked. "That quake did take a lot out of you."

Tarn shrugged. "Nothing a little rest will not cure," he said. "The bedrock in that area was simply a little stubborn, that is all."

I shook my head. "I've never understood how you do that."

My friend chuckled softly. "There is no stone the wind and weather will not wear down, in time," he said. "I simply accelerate the process. That is all."

"Yeah, but there's wearing down, and then there's breaking."

A devilish smile spread across the old cleric's face. "My dearest girl, have you ever seen what a lightning strike can do to a mountaintop?" He sniffed. "On that subject, why do I smell something burning?"

"I put Alaran in charge of lunch."

"Oh." Tarn looked at his compress. Then he put it back on his forehead. "Oh, dear. Why did you do that?"

"Yeah, it might have been a mistake," I agreed. I stood up. The cot's springs jangled. "I hope we don't all end up spending the rest of the day in the shitter. Things could get crowded."

"Perhaps we should pray Shaundakul to send us a new cook."

I bent over, grabbing the rusting iron ring on the top of the trap door to the cellar. "Start praying now," I suggested. It took a couple of tries to pry the door open, which it finally did with an arthritic groan and a puff of gritty dust. I sneezed. "You have until lunchtime to talk him into it."

No answer came from Kelavir. Maybe he was already praying, or maybe he'd just fallen asleep.

I started down the rickety ladder to the basement. It wasn't really much of a basement, just a dirt-floored, stone-lined hole beneath the cabin.

There were, in fact, some burlap sacks at the bottom of the ladder. I opened them, one hand over my nose and mouth. That didn't stop me from sneezing a few more times. "Gah. When was the last time anybody dusted down here?" I rifled through one of the sacks. Shriveled brown lumps stared back out at me. "Hey. Kelavir. You still awake?"

His voice came to me from upstairs, faintly. "No."

I ignored that. "Should potatoes be wrinkly?" I asked. I picked one up and squeezed it. "And squishy?"

"Not as a rule, no."

"Oh." I squeezed a few more potatoes, then gave up. "Screw it," I muttered. "Al the's cook. He can figure this out." I hoisted the sack over my shoulder and started back up the ladder.

I had just wrestled the potatoes out of the cellar when the door banged open hard enough to hit the wall, rebound, and slam against an outstretched hand.

Magda stood silhouetted in the sunlight, frowning. "Oh, there you are, little noble," she boomed, without ceremony. "Zigana needs you. Bring your potions."

Kelavir had shot bolt upright as soon as the door opened. "That is it," he said, his voice strained. "I am going to oil that blasted door with Bazkas' beard cream, if it is the last thing I do."

"It probably will be, if you mess with his beard cream."

"Yes, but I will die with a smile on my face, I assure you." He sighed and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, flipping his hand at me. "Go," he urged. He smiled wrily. "I am more than well enough to carry a sack of potatoes, at least."

I didn't argue with him. "Coming, Mags," I said blandly. She nodded and ducked out of the door. I grabbed my quarterstaff and followed her out.

Magda didn't talk. I didn't either. She strode ahead, her face tight, and I had to work to keep up. I was a tall woman, but Magda had a good four or five inches on me, and they were all leg.

On the far side of the way station someone had hung a couple of squares of canvas from the branches of an old maple, creating a makeshift tent. Magda ducked in. I followed.

Zigana was inside with two other women. One looked a little older than me. She had hair on the border between ash blonde and light brown, and pale blue eyes with the beginnings of fine lines at their corners. The other looked like a younger version of the older – a daughter, maybe, or a niece. I put her at fifteen, sixteen at most. She sat with her feet tucked under her and her arms wrapped tightly around her middle.

Zig was kneeling next to the younger woman. The older woman sat on the other side, her arm wrapped protectively around the girl's shoulders. When Zig saw me, she looked up and nodded towards the girl. Her face was subdued, her dark eyes troubled. "Rebecca," she said. "Thank you for coming."

I remembered how Zig had swung out of that tree and garroted the guy who'd been sneaking up on Mags. I'd have owed her for that even if she weren't part of this weird family. "Sure thing," I answered, and looked at the girl Zig's nod had indicated.

The young girl didn't seem to have any injuries, and even if she did, just about everyone was probably a better healer than me, and Baz a better healer than anybody else. I didn't understand what they thought I could do that he couldn't, but I took my cue, set Silent Partner to one side, and crouched down in front of the girl. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and the cloak she was wrapped in didn't hide the long, jagged rip down the front of her dress.

I started to get a sinking feeling. "Hi," I said out loud. I kept my voice quiet. She looked jumpy, and I didn't want to spook her any more than I wanted to spook Vilholm's horses. "I'm Rebecca." First name only, to keep it nice and informal. _See? I'm not scary at all_. Then a question, one that would lead her back to something familiar and safe. "What's your name?" I asked. She hesitated, and after a second, she whispered it to me. _Kara._ "All right," I said. "How can I help you, Kara?"

In a shaking voice, her eyes low, she told me, with her mother or aunt filling in the blanks when Kara couldn't speak, and that was when I understood what had put that tight look on Magda's face, and why they hadn't sent for Baz. This wasn't a situation anyone would want Baz within fifty feet of.

I listened until the girl was finished talking. Then I nodded, set my satchel down, and took out three small, liquid-filled vials, plus one empty one. I also pulled out a folded-up piece of paper, filled with a list of instructions in Farghan's neat, miniscule handwriting. I didn't do this that often, and I really didn't want to fuck it up.

The girl's eyes followed my movements, and something made me reach out to put my hand on her cheek, drawing her eyes up to meet mine. "Are you sure?" I asked. My voice didn't do gentle, but I tried. I tried real hard.

The girl hesitated. Then, her jaw set in determination, she nodded.

I sat back on my heels. "All right," I said. "Zig, I'll need a cup of water. Boiled, please," I added, and set to work.

Each of the three vials held a tiny something suspended in liquid, the color leeched from it and gone into the fluid around it. One held a colorless twist of root, bathed in very faint amber. Another held a single petal swimming in pale gold. The third held a single bloom with tiny petals and long stamens, the tincture around it as purple as a bruise.I began measuring careful drops of each into the empty vial, glancing often at Farghan's notes. After a minute or two, Zigana stooped back in and handed me a mug of steaming water. I accepted it with a murmured, "Thanks," and set it to one side before going back to my measuring.

The girl watched me. She cleared her throat a couple of times before speaking. "What is that?" she asked, curiosity bringing a little animation back into her face.

"Tinctures of nararoot, evening primrose, and pennyroyal," I explained. "Alone, they all do slightly different things, but if you put them together…well. They'll do what you need them to. And if you don't need them, they still won't do you any harm." Carefully, I began measuring out drops into the mug of water. "I want you to take ten drops of this in a cup of boiled water, well-mixed, three times a day for six days," I instructed. I mixed the potion and held the cup out to her, but didn't let go of it right away. I held her eyes first. "Repeat it back to me, now," I said, businesslike. Farghan had always said that if you were giving somebody something that came with instructions, you'd best be damned sure they understood those instructions. "What should you do?"

She repeated the instructions, her voice steadying as she went along. I made her repeat them once more until I felt satisfied, then told her what to expect, and how long it would take, and what signs meant that something was going wrong and she had to go to a healer.

Then I gave her the cup. She downed it in one gulp.

I watched her. Her face was pale, but her hands were steady. _She'll be okay,_ I thought, relieved _._ The girl looked like a delicate doll, but looks weren't everything. "All right," I said, and reached for my satchel again. "Are we okay here?"

Zigana pushed the girl's hair back from her forehead. "I think so," she said, and flashed me a smile. "Thank you."

I nodded. Looked like I'd gotten my wish after all. I'd wanted to be useful. Well, now I'd been useful. That'd teach me to be careful what I wished for. "No problem," I said gruffly.

When I left, Kara had her head on her older relative's lap, and Zigana was humming a song I didn't recognize, though I thought it sounded a little like a lullaby.

I gulped in fresh air outside. _Look on the bright side_ , I thought to myself. _You can just walk out of there and forget about it. She can't._

Absently, I reached for my hip flask, undid the cork, and took a deep swig of Lantan Blackthroat. It was deep and bracing, with the bitter aftertaste of black walnuts and a smoky-sweet smoothness from cinnamon and nutmeg and clove. It went down smoothly, leaving a burning trail behind it, and I felt the knot in my stomach start to unwind.

Footsteps sounded. I turned my head. A man was heading my way. No one I recognized. "Healer-" he man called.

I shoved the cork back in my flask so hard it was a miracle the silver didn't rupture. "I'm not a healer," I snapped.

He blinked and took a hesitant half-step backwards. "I…I apologize, my lady-"

I cut him off. "I'm not a lady, either."

He didn't blink this time. "I see." After an awkward moment, he sketched a quick bow. "Please excuse me for troubling you," he said, way too politely for the reception he'd gotten, and turned away.

I rubbed my forehead. _Nice going, Rebecca,_ I thought _. You didn't make prom queen so you decided to go for bitch queen instead, is that it?_ I sighed, turned around, and raised my voice. "Hey," I called after the man. "Wait. I'm sorry."

The man stopped and looked over his shoulder. He looked wary. I supposed I couldn't blame him. "I beg your pardon?" he asked.

I crossed over to him. "I'm sorry," I repeated. I reached him and offered my best smile. "Just because I'm in an awful mood doesn't mean you deserve to get your head snapped off. So…I'm sorry."

After another second, he turned back to face me. The defensive set of his shoulders relaxed. "These are hard times for us all," he said. It sounded like an olive branch.

I took the branch gratefully. "You've got that right," I agreed. I leaned on Silent Partner, giving the man in front of me a quick once-over. He had an air of quiet authority, though it was an authority with lines in its face and dark circles under its eyes. He was well-dressed, too, in good if now stained and torn silk. Well-tooled leather gloves were tucked behind an equally well-tooled belt. Nothing fancy or flashy, though, which meant he was well-off, but not rich. A moderately successful merchant, then. Respectable. Probably a family man and a dues-paying guild member."What can I do for you?" I asked.

He hesitated again. "I would not like to impose any further than we already have…"

I waved a hand. "It's not an imposition," I said. "It's our job." I smiled at him encouragingly. "So. You don't want to impose, but…? Don't be shy, man. I know a 'but' when I hear one."

He smiled a little at that. "You are right, of course," he agreed. His smile faded. "It is about my daughter," he said.

 _Oh, fuck._ I tensed for a second until I realized I hadn't actually said that out loud. Then I relaxed. Then I tensed again, because this was obviously going to be one of those conversations. "Go on," I said. "I'm listening."

The man took a deep breath. "She is…missing," he said roughly. "She was with us, before the ambush. I gave her my knife and told her to run. I believe she did. At least, she was not with us when we were taken." Suddenly, he grabbed my forearm. I could feel the desperate pressure of his fingers even through layers of scale and leather and cloth. "Please," he said haltingly. "If you can send somebody to find her…keep her safe…if you have trackers among you…"

I tried to sound soothing, if only to get him to release his death grip on my arm. "Don't worry. We do. Where would she have gone?"

He shook his head helplessly. "That is just it," he confessed. His words wavered between halting and hurried. "I cannot be sure. There is a possibility…I have a sister in Yartar. We were headed to join her when…well, when all of this occurred. My daughter, Nat – Natali, that is – she is a brave girl, and clever, and knows enough to look for us there, but she is only ten. She has no money to buy food, nothing of value to barter with, and she has never been to Yartar, has never even been outside of Waterdeep. I fear that she may get lost, or worse, may try to return home-"

I shook my head. "That, at least, can't happen," I tried to reassure him. "Not with the city under quarantine. If she tries to go home, she'll just get turned away. If the guards have any sense, they'll make sure she gets somewhere safe for the time being. Rassalantar, maybe."

 _If they can spare anyone to get her there_ , a treacherously practical inner voice said. But they wouldn't turn away a kid. I hoped. She was probably fine. Anyway, I didn't need to convince myself, I needed to convince her dad so he would stop freaking out so badly. "Look," I said. "We'll help. We have good woodsmen. They'll find her. But don't drive yourself crazy. She's been gone for, what, a day? She can't have gone far, and the weather's warm, so she's in no danger of freezing or starving." I carefully avoided mentioning other risks, like eating poisonous berries or falling in the Dessarin and drowning or getting eaten by a swamp troll or torn apart by a pack of gibberlings or all of those other things that could happen but you couldn't really mention to a worried parent. "You say she knows enough to go to Yartar, and if she does, and she's smart, she'll get there, ask a guard for directions to your sister's house, and be home safe and waiting for you by the time you get there yourself."

The man bit his lip. He had the expression of someone who wanted to believe me but couldn't bring himself to. "That all presupposes that she makes it to Yartar," he said bitterly. "The roads are no longer safe."

I hesitated. "She won't have valuables, or anything else they want," I said at last. I tried not to think of Kara. This Nat was only ten. Bandits were usually opportunistic and not above doling out a little pain, but some things had to be beyond them. I hoped. "And hopefully word has gotten around that Waterdeep isn't in any position to be paying ransoms right now." Of course, that meant that bandits would just start killing people for their valuables as opposed to kidnapping and ransoming them _plus_ taking their valuables, but no need to mention that now.

The man stared at me for a few more moments. After a long pause, he finally let go of my arm and took a deep breath. "You are right," he said. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. "It may be that I am thinking too much about this. I will have faith in the gods."

 _As long as you don't have faith in me_. I had no idea if anything I'd said was true, but it seemed to have calmed him down, at least. _One problem at a time_. _Next problem: find someone who can track a scared kid._ I put my hand on his back. "We'll look for her. You said you'll be heading to Yartar?"

"Yes." He gestured vaguely. "One of your fellow clerics mentioned that some of you might be available as an escort…?"

"If you want one, we'll be one," I said, steering him towards the cookfire. "Come on. It smells like lunch is almost ready. Then let's go eat something, then we'll talk. I'm Rebecca, by the way," I added, hiking my quarterstaff up to my shoulder and then twisting around to offer him my right hand. "What's your name?"

"Belorin," he said, and clasped my hand. "Belorin Kulenov."

"Kulenov?" A faint bell rang in my head. It surprised me that it rang at all, but I supposed after a few years in Faerun it was inevitable that I'd start to develop an ear for these things. "That doesn't sound like a local name."

He smiled faintly. "No," he said. "You are right. It is Cormyrean." He held up a hand, red-knuckled and square. "My family has belonged to the Order of Cobblers and Corvisers for three generations. My great-grandfather was a tanner. He came here as a young man and found that the city was hungry for talented leather workers, so he adapted his trade to suit his new home." His face turned sad. "And now, after three generations, I leave it."

I was quiet for a few steps, mulling over what to say. "There are a lot of crazy rumors about what's going on," I said eventually. "The quarantine's kept much real news from getting out."

"Good." His voice was harsh. "Gods willing, if the news cannot escape, nothing else will."

I looked at him sidelong. His jaw was tight, his face hollowed out under some kind of heavy, sucking tension. "If it does, it'd help the rest of us out here to know what's coming," I said quietly.

He hesitated. His face looked strained. "You are right," he said eventually. "You are right, but…" Suddenly, he laughed. His laugh was as hollow as his face. "How can I describe it? Priestess, what has taken Waterdeep is _madness_ ," he burst out. "Madness, and things in the shadows. The streets are no longer safe. Nowhere is safe. It is not so bad during the daytime, but when the sun goes down, wise men bar the doors and seek high ground." His lips trembled. "My nephew…" He cleared his throat before going on, his voice unsteady. "He went down the stairs to draw a bottle of wine. We heard nothing until the screaming, and when we found him…" He stopped. Whatever state his nephew had been in when they found him, the memory seemed to choke Belorin's words in his throat.

Whatever had been going on in the city, it had left this guy with some seriously shot nerves, though the bandit ambush definitely hadn't helped. I was starting to regret asking questions. All I was doing was getting him worked up again. "I think I get the idea," I said.

"No." The man's voice cracked like a whip. "I think you do not." His tone softened. It seemed to be a conscious effort. "Be glad, Windwalker. You are free of that nightmare." His smile was thin and sour, like bad wine. "Pray your god keeps you that way. I have certainly prayed to mine."

"If more refugees are coming, then my place is out here, helping keep the roads safe," I said. "No need for prayer to know I shouldn't be anywhere near Waterdeep." I shouldered Silent Partner and guided the man on. "Now, let's eat, track down our trackers, and talk about how we're gonna find your daughter."


	8. Favored

_A/N: Correct chapter. Sorry to anyone who saw the wrong one sneak in. I've been up for close to 48 hours and my brain isn't operating at 100%.  
_

* * *

 _You are a child of the universe,  
_ _no less than the trees and the stars;  
_ _you have a right to be here.  
_ _And whether or not it is clear to you,  
_ _no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should._

 _Therefore be at peace with God,  
_ _whatever you conceive Him to be,  
_ _and whatever your labors and aspirations,  
_ _in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.  
_ _With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,  
_ _it is still a beautiful world._

 _Be cheerful._

 _Strive to be happy._

\- Max Ehrmann, "Desiderata"

~*~  
Chapter 8: Favored  
~*~

The area around the cabin had gotten a lot more crowded. Alaran and Alys were bustling at the fireside. People were up and about, some of them with blankets still draped over their shoulders. Further on, a not-so-clean canvas provided a screen for what, judging by the clothes flung over a nearby branch, the splashing, and a few recently scrubbed faces, had been turned into a rudimentary outdoor washroom. Safety and sleep had been taken care of, and it looked like next up were food, drinks, and clean armpits.

I found Bazkas, Atuar, Vilholm, Zig, Mags and Kelavir all gathered around the battered old table. They were studying a map which looked as if it had actually visited most of the locations it showed. Hand-drawn lines sketched in routes that weren't on the original, and tiny, tightly written notes occupied most of the margins. There was also a brown mug stain on one corner. It looked like tea. Either that or it was a previously undiscovered, perfectly circular landmass smack in the middle of Thay. But my money was on it being tea.

Kelavir was leaning over his map, his hands braced on the table to either side of it. He looked tired, but at least he was standing. "Bazkas and I can take these folk to Yartar, if they are willing of our company," he was saying. "The two of us should be sufficient escort in case of trouble. We will rouse the patrols and wayshrines as we go, then continue to raise the alarm along the Evermoor Way from Yartar to Everlund. Velantha is already collecting volunteers among her Luckbringers. With their aid, I thought we might establish a relay system."

Vilholm grunted. "Makes sense," he said. "It'll save the horses."

Kelavir smiled. "Not to mention our feet – and time. Messages will travel faster by relay than by single messenger." He tapped his map. "I think Bazkas' idea is sound. We will better be able to raise the alarm if we split up, say into teams of two – one woodsman and one spokesman per team."

"A tracker and a talker," Baz put in. "One for anything that can be shot or snuck around, the other for anything that needs smoother negotiating skills than an arrow in the eye socket."

Tarn chuckled. "As you say." His head turned, and he smiled his courtier's smile. "Master Kulenov," the old cleric said, with a slightly deeper nod of greeting. It wasn't anything near a bow – I didn't think I'd ever seen Kelavir bow to anyone, come to think of it – but I thought it was exactly as respectful as it needed to be to satisfy all the proprieties. "We were just discussing you. If you wish, Bazkas and I would be glad to see your company safely to Yartar. Once you are rested, of course."

The cobbler bowed. "Then I think I speak for all of us when I say we'll accept your help, Windwalker, and be glad of it," he said. Then he hesitated and looked over at me, as if uncertain whether to go on or cede the floor to me.

I saw his look and took the floor. "We've got a situation," I explained. "Belorin's daughter managed to get away when they were attacked, but he doesn't know where she went. Could be trying to find her way to an aunt in Yartar, or home to Waterdeep, or could just be wandering around lost. She's ten. Just has a knife and the clothes on her back. He needs someone to find her before she gets hurt."

Baz was gnawing on a piece of long grass. "You got something of hers?" he asked Belorin. "Clothes. A toy. Anything she'll have touched more'n a time or two."

The cobbler nodded, after a moment. "A doll."

"Good," Baz grunted. The grass stalk flipped from one side of his mouth to the other. "The site where your caravan was attacked isn't that far. We could sniff out her trail before we split up. Whoever's going in the same direction she did can take over from there. If the girl's got any brains, she'll stick close to the road, so it shouldn't be too hard to find her."

I cleared my throat. "What's this about splitting up?"

Baz turned his attention to me. "We'll need to rouse what forces there are on the roads hereabouts, since the City Guard has its hands a mite full," he explained. "Town patrols. Inn guards. The other wayshrines. We figured we'd all pick a different direction and raise the alarm every which way we can."

Zigana spoke up. "Atuar and I have decided to go north, along the Coast Way," she said. "I have contacts in Neverwinter." She coughed delicately. "The Neverwinter city officials will most likely choose to remain aloof from Waterdeep's troubles unless those troubles spread north, but my contacts may be persuaded that their interests do not align with those of the authorities."

"After seeing you negotiate, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get them on your side," I said drily. Zigana dipped her head in acknowledgement of the compliment. I looked at Vilholm. "And you? Where're you headed?"

The ranger smiled. Faintly. "Alaran," he said. "Longsaddle."

The man didn't waste breath, I'd give him that. "That leaves me and Mags," I said. "And if you guys have the north and east covered, that leaves us the south. Unless you're thinking we should swim west into the Sea of Swords and interrogate some krakens?"

Baz guffawed. "Actually, Thunderbeast here thought you might fancy a trip south, so if it's all the same to the two of you, you can take care of the southern Long Road and Trade Way."

Magda draped an arm over my shoulders. "You see what I do for you, little noble?" she announced. "I have saved you from Longsaddle and its vicious killer rabbits." She beamed. "You may thank me now."

I rolled my eyes. "They weren't rabbits, Mags. They were Malarites."

"Magda fails to see the distinction. They were in the form of rabbits, yes?"

"Yeah, but they also had fangs. And red eyes. That glowed."

"Truly? What a strange thing for a rabbit to have."

"That's kind of my point."

Baz's head swiveled from me to Mags and back again. "You two done?" he asked.

I looked at Mags. "Are we?"

She grinned at me. "Not until you thank your dear friend Magda."

"All right, fine. Thanks, Mags. You're a peach."

"You are welcome."

I turned to Baz, who was drumming his fingers against the table. "Okay," I said. "Now we're done."

The dwarf scowled at me. "Good. Now. You still chummy with Schael over at the Flaming Fist?"

I shrugged. "I was when I left Baldur's Gate for Fort Beluarian," I answered. "And since her sailors and cargo were fine when I left 'em, I'd say we're probably still okay."

"In that case, if you have time to go as far as Baldur's Gate, you can darken Schael's door and see if she's willing to push her company to increase the northern patrols. That should help matters on the Trade Way, at least."

"I can try," I said. "No promises, though. You know how she is-"

We were interrupted by the sound of a spoon banging on a metal pot, the universal sign for food, and anything else we might have said got shunted aside in favor of seeing what Alaran had done to lunch

As it turned out, the burnt bits added some flavor to the stew, which it really needed so that was fine. I juggled my bowl and a mug of slightly stale dandelion root tea over to a handy log, where a few of the others had settled in to eat.

The log jerked as Alys the Dyer plopped down next to me. She'd lost her shoes somewhere, and now she curled her bare toes in the grass while she grinned at me around her spoon. "H'lo," she mumbled. She swallowed her mouthful of stew and gestured with her spoon. "Sorry about the burnt parts. We got distracted. Ally was showing me how to juggle and one of his balls caught fire." Without bothering to clarify that statement or answer any one of the trillion questions that immediately sprang to mind, she turned her grin on Bazkas. "Now you, I've yet to speak to. Well met! I'm Alys Cartwright. Used to be a dyer, right up until giant spiders started crawling out of the vats. Now I'm seeking new opportunities. And you are?"

The dwarf stopped shoveling food in his mouth long enough to salute her with his spoon and introduce himself as, "Bazkas the Bastard. No surname." He burped. "Pleased t'meetcha."

The ex-dyer gazed at him with frank curiosity. "Are you truly? A bastard, I mean."

Baz snorted. "Oh, aye. Born to a great lord of Thullurn and a midden maid, and given to the temple of Abbathor with the rest of the bastards just as soon as the midwife could cut the cord."

Alys was busy industriously licking gravy off her spoon and didn't answer right away. "Oh? Where's Thullurn?" she asked once she was done.

"It's a city in the Great Rift." Bazkas leaned over and spat on the ground. "Home of the proud and, ha, noble heirs of Bhaerynden deep. Gold dwarves, to you humans."

The dyer's eyes followed the arc of the spit's travel with apparent interest. "Sounds like you're not too keen on your kin."

"Oh, my kin are kind enough as long as everything is nice and orderly and everyone knows their place, which mostly depends on your family and bloodline. But bastards are of no family and break up the bloodline, so there's no place for us but Abbathor's hall, where we're taught to do our sums and mind our betters and be grateful for whatever scraps we're given."

Alys winced. "Reminds me of the time my parents made me go to lessons with the Oghmites," she muttered. "So, how'd you go from Abbathor to Shaundakul?"

Baz snorted. "The old windbag bamboozled me into it while I was busy bleeding my guts out in a snowdrift," he said. "That's how."

Alys blinked. "You call your god a windbag?"

"Among other things, aye. When he merits it. Which is often."

"Oh. Huh. Interesting." Alys set aside her empty bowl and slid down to sit comfortably in the grass with her knees pulled to her chest. "So, tell me, bastard. Why were you bleeding your guts out?"

Baz gave up on trying to eat, leaned back, crossed his arms over his broad chest, and fixed her with a bemused, black-eyed stare. "You're full of questions, aren't you?"

The dark-haired woman shrugged, unruffled. "I'm just curious. You Windwalkers are an odd lot. Why? Have I offended you?"

"No, but most people take one look at this face and swallow their questions."

The dyer raised her eyebrows. A hint of an impish grin dimpled her cheeks. "And I say good on them, if they can look at that face and swallow anything," she returned. At the dwarf's appreciative guffaw, her grin widened. "Did you get those scars the same time you got your guts carved out?" she asked then, pointing a skinny dye-stained finger at his face.

"Some of them, aye." Bazkas ran the tip of one forefinger along the scars that criss-crossed his face and scalp. They were pale, puckered, and numerous. "The long and arduous work of master craftsmen, these were," he said, with a peculiar tone of pride. "I'd betrayed my master, so he had a few of his best knives hunt me down, carve me like a freshly roasted pheasant, and leave me for dead."

"You had a master? Were you a slave?"

"Well, now, that depends on how you look at it, doesn't it? He was a smuggler out of Innarlith. Needed someone who was tough enough to crack skulls for him and smart enough to mind his books, too, so the temple of Abbathor signed me over to him in exchange for a tidy fee, and it was either put my mark on the contract or get sent to the deep mines."

Alys gaped, aghast. "How could they do that?"

Baz shrugged. "They held my debt," he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Bringin' up a dwarf to adulthood is an expensive proposition, for which I was expected to repay the priests and their god. Until I had, I was theirs to hire out – which they did as soon as I was old enough to swing a sword."

"What happened to put you in that snowdrift, then?"

Baz laughed harshly. "Stupidity," he answered. "My master's girl had run off with a good chunk of his gold, or so he told me. He sent me after her. I tracked her across damned near half the world, or so it felt. Found her, too." A reminiscent smile crossed his face. "Woman cussed me out so hard I think my ancestors heard her. Whoever the Hells they are." His smile faded. "'Course, he hadn't told me about the babe, nor that he'd threatened to kill the boy for fear she might come back and try to lay a claim on his money on behalf of the child. So she grabbed what she could and put as much distance between her son and his papa as she could." Another sigh. "I should've killed 'em both. Would've been easier on all involved."

Alys looked at him, her winter-gray eyes thoughtful. "But you didn't kill them," she said.

"No," Baz admitted with a grimace. "Like I said. Stupidity. I told her to take the boy and run, then I laid a false trail to draw the others off. But they caught me eventually, and as to the rest, well, that I told you." He rubbed one hand over his bare, battered scalp. "So there I was, bleedin' to death and lookin' forward to a well-earned trip to the Abyss, when all of the sudden this blasted light hits me, and I came back to m'self to see my wounds knit up like they'd never been and this old human with the worst beard I'd ever seen in my life crouchin' over me and smilin' like he'd just heard a mighty fine joke. And then he says to me that I was welcome to die if that was what I wanted, but that he had a better idea, if I was willing to listen."

Alys' grin had turned wondering. "And you listened?"

Baz busted out laughing. "Hells, no!" he exclaimed. "I told that bastard exactly where he could shove his offer. Then I managed to crawl to the nearest town and spent the next tenday lookin' at the world through the bottom of a bottle."

Alys goggled, for once seeming caught off-guard. "But he saved your life!"

"For what? I'd no further use for it, and even less use for gods. Then the rat bastard son of a bitch had the nerve to bring me back! If he weren't immortal, I would've killed him myself." Bazkas grimaced. "But I found out that the bastard had done something when he healed me, and suddenly, I was doin' things I hadn't been able to do before. Healin' people, as opposed to crackin' their skulls. Tellin' truth from lies. Whatever he did, well, it didn't undo the damage I'd already done in the world, but at least it let me do something to balance it out." He shrugged. "And, Hells, I was free of the temple, now that they thought I was dead, so it seemed for the first time in my life I was free to decide what to do with my life. Figured it might as well be this." The dwarf stroked his long, glossy black beard. "Eventually, I came 'round," he finished. "Though I still can't abide his beard. Pitiful scraggly thing, it is."

"Few can compete with you on that score, dear Bazkas," Kelavir assured him.

Alys turned to the platinum-haired priest. "What of you?" she asked, her eyes twinkling. "Did you call your god all manner of awful names, too?"

He laughed. "Oh, yes," he admitted. "Though I was much younger than Bazkas, which I will claim as my excuse."

"How old were you?"

"I was a lad of nineteen, and determined that I would not see twenty."

"Whatever made you determine _that_?"

Kelavir sighed. "A personal tragedy, though in retrospect, entirely preventable." Rue colored his voice. "As I said, I was nineteen, and like many lads of nineteen, I had fallen in love with entirely the wrong person."

"Wrong in what way?"

"In many ways," Kelavir frowned pensively. "We belonged to a pair of ancient and noble houses, and were expected to marry not only for political advantage, but to produce heirs. On the one score, our families were rivals and not even marriage could have repaired the breach between them. As to children…" Tarn chuckled. "Well, suffice it to say that not even an act of divine intervention would have rendered that possible, though we surely would have been the talk of Faerun had we succeeded." His smile dwindled. "Our families threatened to disown us if we did not renounce our relationship and make the matches they preferred. We refused. I think we fancied ourselves the lead players in our own twopenny tragedy."

Alys made a face. "I've seen a few of those plays myself, over at the Lightsinger of an eve. Star-crossed lovers and all that. They don't usually end well."

"Indeed they do not." Tarn's smile was a little sad. "With the benefit of hindsight, I should have just married the girl my parents had chosen," he admitted. "My lover and I could have remained bedmates and repaired to our own household once we had done our duty by our houses and produced the requisite heirs, and our wives could have done the same with companions of their choosing. It is hardly an uncommon arrangement in these kinds of political marriages." He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "But instead, we refused to compromise, defied our families, and were accordingly disinherited. We had assumed that true love would conquer all, even poverty, but when faced with the very real prospect of living the rest of his life as a nameless pauper, my beloved swallowed poison instead."

Alys winced. "I'm sorry."

Kelavir nodded. "Thank you," he said simply. The memory of grief, faded but not gone, clung to the corners of his eyes as he went on. "Of course, because we were well into this march of melodramatic foolery and it was far too late to stop now, I naturally decided to follow him into death-"

Bazkas rolled his eyes. "Naturally," he said. "You lackwit."

Kelavir glided smoothly through the interruption, paying the dwarf no mind. "-though in my case I deemed throwing myself off of a cliff to be a more suitably romantic end."

Bazkas barked a laugh. "Romantic?" he echoed. "Splattering your brains all over the ground is _romantic_?"

Alys was listening raptly, her chin propped on the heel of one hand. "I think you'd have to be nineteen and in love to understand it," she murmured.

"No," Baz disagreed. "You have to be nineteen and a damned _idiot_ to understand it."

"Yes, well." Tarn shrugged. "Such is the folly of youth." He pursed his lips. "As I was saying, then. I was quite young, and quite heartbroken, and quite determined to end my life. And so I tried to hurl myself from the highest cliff I could find…"

Alys leaned forward. "And?" she prompted.

Tarn laughed. "As to that," he said. "Note that I say _tried_."

"What stopped you?"

The old cleric's lips twitched. "Well, it took me some time to notice it, since I was far too wrapped up in my grief to be particularly observant of the world around me, but eventually I noticed that I did not seem to be falling. As a matter of fact, I seemed to be stuck in mid-air some ten paces below the cliff's edge."

Alys giggled. "That must have been _awfully_ confusing."

"Especially for a highnose like you," Baz drawled. "You and Lady Mophead here. It's the blue blood. It must suck all the air out of your brains or some such."

Kelavir shot him a mild glance. "Bazkas."

"Aye?"

Tarn smiled. "Hush." He paused thoughtfully. "Now, where was I? Ah, yes. In midair." He cleared his throat. "At that point it occurred to me that, rather than ending my life, I had merely caused it to take a turn for the strange. To make matters even more confusing, I soon realized that I was not alone."

Alys smiled. "Shaundakul?" she asked, as if she already knew the answer.

Kelavir inclined his head. "The very same," he confirmed. He chuckled. "Standing in the empty air just in front of me, in fact," he added. "Though by then I think I had reached my daily limit of strangeness, and I confronted this detail with a certain tranquility of mind. Certainly it seemed no more or less strange than any of the other things that had happened to me recently."

I huffed a laugh, remembering the first time I'd seen Shaundakul, too. "He likes his dramatic entrances, doesn't he?" I asked drily.

"They can be startling, certainly," Kelavir agreed. "When he saw that I had noticed him, of course, he smiled. Then he asked what I was doing. I answered that obviously I was trying to kill myself, as any fool could see, if it was all the same to him I would rather he left me alone so that I could get on with it."

Baz smirked. "What'd the old man say to that, then?"

"Oh, he sat down – in midair, mind, and as comfortably as you or I might sit in a chair – and politely suggested that I reconsider my plan."

"And you said?"

Kelavir smiled wryly. "I suggested that he go to the Abyss. Among other things. Including, I think, the hope that he might find himself repeatedly ravaged in every way imaginable by a horde of berserking she-ogres."

The dwarf laughed and slapped his knee. "No!" he cackled delightedly. "You did _what_?"

Kelavir lifted his hands helplessly. "What else should I have done?" he wondered. "I was furious. I was young and thoroughly convinced that my grief was the beginning and end of all things, and that no one else had ever felt such pain as I was feeling in that moment, and I did not appreciate this creature, whatever he was, intruding on this very important business of killing myself. So I screamed at him."

I blinked. I'd heard most of this story, but he'd never told me about the screaming part. "You? Screaming? I didn't think you knew how."

"Oh, I do, though I try to avoid it these days. I find that it does more harm than good. At the time, though, I was a champion screamer." Tarn rubbed his chin reminiscently. "I think it was midafternoon before my voice began to give out," he mused. "But Shaundakul waited quite patiently, and in fact appeared to find my response quite amusing – a fact which, of course, only made me more furious. When I finally ran out of words, he offered to take me into his service as if I had not just spent half the day insulting him. I refused, of course. I was very determined to die. After a time, he seemed to accept my answer, and he released me, though not before telling me that he would give me a gift to show his good intentions, and touching me-" Kelavir touched his forehead, and I almost reached up to touch mine, half an echo his gesture and half an echo of my own memories. "-here. And something…changed in me, quite profoundly. When I came back to myself, I was back on the top of the cliff." Abruptly, Tarn laughed. "So of course I tried to throw myself off of the cliff again."

Alys choked on her tea. "You _what_?"

Bazkas was laughing more or less steadily, now. "Good gods. You're not only an idiot," he wheezed. "You're a _persistent_ idiot."

"Perhaps I am, at that…but you will be pleased to know that my second attempt worked no better than the first one- although I did fall. I simply fell very, very slowly, and arrived at the bottom of the cliff utterly furious and utterly unharmed."

Baz chuckled. "How long did you keep that up for?"

"Sixteen days."

Silence hit.

"What?" Alys said at last, blankly. It seemed to be all she could think of saying.

Bazkas was shaking his head. "Wait, wait, wait," he said, holding his hand up for quiet. "Let me get this straight. Did you just keep throwing yourself off the same cliff over and over, or did you try different ones?"

"Oh, I tried quite a few cliffs, by the end. Among many other things."

"None of 'em worked, eh?"

"Not a one. My nooses failed when a gust of wind snapped the branches that held them. The runaway carriage I had intended to get myself trampled by veered away at the very last minute, the horses spooked by a flock of sparrows. The apothecary who would have sold me my poison was destroyed by a freak tornado." He chuckled, shaking his head. "Eventually, of course, I grew tired of trying and failing to kill myself. So I gave up."

"Almost two tendays later," Baz pointed out.

"Despair is a stubborn thing."

"Aye. So's stupidity."

Alys was staring at him thoughtfully. "When did you accept his offer, then?" she asked curiously.

"Not immediately. Like Bazkas, I was far too angry and prideful. As I saw it, the gods had never helped me, or why would they have let the one I loved die? They were cruel. I would not help them, and it was beneath me to serve them."

"So how'd you come around?"

Tarn smiled reminiscently. "I wandered," he said. "I saw things I had never seen before, things the shelter of wealth and privilege had not allowed me to see." His eyes went distant. "I came to know that my grief was not the only grief in the world, and my pain was nothing next to what so many others were suffering. And, as Bazkas did, I found myself doing things. Things I had never dreamed of doing, things which made my life before seem so small and mean and bounded. And each thing I did, each person I helped, took away a little of my pain and replaced it with joy. Eventually, I realized that I no longer wanted to die, and when Shaundakul once again asked me if I it was still my wish for him to leave me and to take his gift away, I realized that I did not want that, either. And if I was to live, my life might as well have a purpose beyond mere survival." He spread his hands. "And so here I am," he said simply. "Serving my purpose."

Silence fell again.

Eventually, Baz spoke. "That's a powerful tale," he said. "O' course, you know what a tale like that needs to finish it off."

Alys perked up, curious. "What?"

The dwarf lifted one leg and let out…well, I wasn't sure what it was, but it was something that could only have come from dwarven bowels and I was pretty sure it made my hair blow straight back for a second.

The rest of us stood abruptly, coughing and flapping our hands. " _Baz_ kas," Tarn said, in tones of disgust. "Truly?"

"What? What?" The dwarf watched, his hands outspread in a pose of innocence, as Kelavir stalked off, the edge of his cloak held over his mouth and nose. "What'd I do?"

I waved my hand in front of my face. "Jesus, Baz," I wheezed. "What are you, part otyugh?"

He shot me a grin. "Damned if I know. Bastard, remember?"

I staggered off, shaking my head and trying not to breathe.

Magda was standing near the cabin, regaling Atuar and Alaran with what looked like a story of one of her most recent bar fights, going by the gestures. "And so I said, "So you like filth, do you!" and I took him by the hair and mopped the counter clean with his face," she said as I approached. "Hah! He will think twice the next time he-" She broke off abruptly. Her nose wrinkled. "What _is_ that stench?"

I reached her elbow and coughed a couple of times. "Don't ask," I croaked. I blinked. "I'm gonna take a nap," I added, or tried to before the last words dissolved in a jaw-cracking yawn. The sleepless night was starting to catch up with me. My eyelids felt like somebody had hung a pair of fishing weights on them. I headed for the cabin door, since with this many people around and awake the cabin was the only place that might be quiet. "Wake me when it's time to leave."

When I woke up again, it was to Magda's hand shaking me and the slant of midafternoon sunlight. "You slept straight through lunch," she said. As usual, her face was an open book, this time with 'worry' written across it in very big letters. "Are you unwell?"

I flailed a little against the sagging cot as I tried to sit up, blinking sleep out of my eyes. "Nah," I said. My next words almost got swallowed in a yawn. "Didn't get much sleep yesterday is all."

The Uthgardt gave me a searching look. "Bad dreams?"

I nodded. She patted me on the shoulder – gently, for her, which meant the scales on my vest only jangled a little. "Come," she said. "There is tea, and terrible bread that your odd little half-elf tried and failed to bake. You will eat and drink, and then we will go."

I smiled up at her. No force on earth was going to get Mags to suggest instead of command, but I didn't really mind. Sometimes it was nice to be mothered. "Whatever you say," I said agreeably, and stood. That wasn't so easy. Damn cot really didn't want to let me go.

The horses had been hitched back to the wagons, and after a mug of tea and a chunk of half-raw, half-scorched pot bread, I climbed aboard the nearest wagon and watched Vilholm stare at the horses for a long few seconds. Then, as if responding to some unspoken command, they all started to move at once, and that wasn't creepy _at all._

The wagons creaked into motion. We were on our way.

The sun had climbed down to late afternoon by the time we reached the road near ambush site. Vilholm did something imperceptible that nevertheless made the horses stop in unison, which was still _totally not creepy_ , and Belorin clambered down from the wagons. He walked up and down the road, slowly, then stopped and turned, eyes searching. He was pale. "We were…there," he said, raising his hand and pointing to a copse of juniper near the north side of the road. I thought some of the branches had been broken, though I couldn't tell when and by what. "By the juniper thicket. I gave her my knife and bade her hide in that bush."

Vilholm was already sticking his nose into the bush, like some rangy grey hound sniffing for deer. "Aye," he said at last. "She was here." He knelt. "Tracks. A child. Day, day and a half." He stood and started to walk at a slow and measured pace, his eyes on the ground. From where I stood, it all looked like dirt to me, but I supposed that was why he was the ranger and I wasn't. After a long, tense few minutes of pacing and kneeling and squinting until he was several hundred feet down the road, the ranger ambled back. "West," he reported. "Along the south side of the road."

Belorin blew out a breath. It looked like he'd been holding it for a while. "She must have gone home," he said. "We have a shop and a house…off Simple's Street, on the south side of Virgin's Square. Locked tight, now, but she knows the way in." His hands were absently wringing one of his nice leather gloves. "Gods be good. If she has gone back there-"

Kelavir stepped up and laid a hand on the man's shoulder. "As a matter of fact, I would name this good news," he said. "She will not have gotten far, she will not get past the gates, and that area of the Long Road is thick with villages and settlements, so it will be much safer than the Evermoor even without Waterdeep's patrols."

I saw the merchant take another couple of breaths, then nod jerkily. "Yes," he said. "What you say makes sense."

From the corner of my eye, I saw a figure in a stained gray dress climb down from the wagon. "Wait," Alys said. Twitching her skirt straight, she marched over to us. Then she stopped, like she'd built up a head of steam on the way but it had all suddenly run out of her. "I've no kin in Yartar," she blurted at last. Her fingers twisted in gray cotton. "Nor anywhere else, for that matter, nor a trade to speak of now that the guild's half-destroyed. I'd go with you. Any of you. If I may."

We all stared at her, up until the startled silence was broken by a nasal laugh. "All right," Alaran said. "I'll bite." He stepped forward and took the woman's hand, grinning. "Tell me, Alys-the-dyer," he said. "Have you ever been to Longsaddle?"

She stared at him for a long moment before a broad grin broke over her face. "Never," she said. "Is it interesting?"

Alaran's grin widened. "Aye," he said. "That's definitely one word for it."

Zigana pulled a spare dagger out of her boot, flipped it in her hand, and approached the other woman, offering the weapon hilt-first. "Here," she said. "You should be armed."

Alys took the dagger. "Don't you-"

Zigana smiled. "I have others," she said. "Never fear."

Baz and I exchanged glances. He leaned close, pitching his voice for my ears alone. "She seems t'have taken to us."

I hmm'ed. "Like a fish to water."

"Think she'll be getting a very special visitor?"

"I think that's between her and Mister Windy, don't you?"

Belorin was talking earnestly to Vilholm. "Her name is Natali, but she responds only to Nat," he said. "She has reddish hair, and brown eyes, like her mother did. She is…she is a coltish little thing. Mostly elbows and knees. She was wearing a blue tunic, a red leather vest, tan breeches, and one of my best pairs of calfskin boots." His hands clasped and unclasped. "Please find her, and when you do, let her know…I am well, and her Aunt Tessa is well, and we will all be waiting for her at her Aunt Hana's house. Please."

Tarn smiled and patted his shoulder. "They will find her, and they will tell her," he reassured the man. He turned to Vilholm. "I imagine the six of you will go your separate ways at the end-moot of Long and Evermoor," he said, and held out a cloth-wrapped bundle. "Whoever takes up the trail from there will likely need this."

Vilholm took the bundle with a nod. "Safe travels," he said gruffly.

Kelavir smiled at the man, then ignored his bristly gruffness and leaned over to kiss his cheek soundly. "To you as well, my friend," he said. Then he did the same to Atuar, and Zigana, and Alaran before coming to me and Mags. "Magda Thunderbeast," he said formally, but his smile took on a tinge of mischief. "It has been a pleasure, as always."

Tears filled the Uthgardt's pale blue eyes. She leaned down to accept his kiss in exchange for planting a big, wet one on his cheek. "Old man Tarn," she said. "You will stay alive long enough for us to see you again, yes?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Of course. You must bring my student back to me, after all. There is still much more for her to learn." Then he turned to me, and before I could stop him, he took my head between his hands and planted a sound kiss on my forehead. "Faith, Rebecca," he told me. "Faith, and patience. The wind can bring down mountains, if you just give it time." Then, grinning, he dug in his pocket and tossed something to me. "Here. I have something for you. Keep it safe – I will expect to get it back when next we meet. With a full report, of course."

I caught the thing and held it up. It was a slightly lopsided oval of polished rainbow fluorspar, streaked in all colors from black to gray to green and purple and pink and milky white. I rubbed my thumb over it, admiring the way the colors shifted in the sunlight – though they seemed to be blurring a little, just then. "I'll see you again, old man," I said gruffly. "Don't you worry."

He gave me an almost excruciatingly elegant bow, a laugh dancing at the corners of his lips and his lichen-colored eyes. "I shall hold you to that," he said, and then he turned away.

Baz looked at me sidelong, or maybe it was more side-and-up. Same as with Drogan, I always forgot how short he was until he was standing right next to me. "I still owe you a drink," he said. "For. Y'know. Doin' what was needful."

I pocketed the stone and slapped his shoulder with the back of my hand. "You're on," I said. "Next time I see you, you filthy bastard, it'd better be with a cask of Berduskan Dark and two glasses."

Baz grinned. "You just make sure there's a next time, y'hear me?" he chided. Then he bumped his fist lightly against my knee and hurried away to say his goodbyes to everyone else before things could get mushy.

The rest of us watched the wagons trundle off until they were just a haze of road dust.

Then we turned west, towards Triboar and the road ahead.

* * *

We camped at the common caravan site near the crossroads to the west of Triboar, a big bare stretch of packed earth pocked with firepits. It was eerily quiet, with just a few merchants' wagons and guard companies clustered on the side closest to the road. News had obviously gotten around, but what worried me more was that everything seemed to be falling apart so _fast_. I'd walked down this road just a few days ago, and things had seemed normal. What would the roads be like in another three days? A week? A month?

 _Look on the bright side_ , I told myself. _If there's no one on the road, there's no one for bandits to go after._

 _Yeah_ , another part of my brain argued. _But bandits won't quit banditry and take up basketweaving just 'cause business isn't booming - and what happens when they start to get desperate?_

Sometimes I really hated my brain.

Atuar and Vilholm had a fire going and a couple of rabbits roasting over it in no time at all. I explored the fringes of the campsite and came back with a few handfuls of early spring onions and some fresh bluefoot mushrooms, which Atuar took and did something delicious to with rabbit drippings in a dented old fry pan.

Dinner was quiet, with half of us drooping over our plates, even the irrepressible Alys, and we turned in early.

Sometime just before dawn, my eyes popped open. For a long, disoriented moment, I couldn't tell what had woken me. Then I saw Vilholm, crouched by the embers of the fire. He'd just thrown a few branches on it, making it crackle and spit. I sat up, rubbing the back of my neck. That was one thing I missed from my old life. The past couple of years had been scarce on foam mattresses and feather pillows, and let's not even get started on the lack of room service. "You're up early," I observed.

The ranger looked up. "Was taking a look," he said, and stood. To my surprise, because he seemed standoffish at the best of times, he walked right over to me. It took me a long, sleep-fogged few seconds to see that he was holding something out for me to take. "Girl's tracks headed south," he said. "She's sticking close to the road."

I took the object, my movements slow and sleep-fogged. It was a cloth-wrapped something or other, and when I turned back the wrappings, I saw the fixed, glassy-eyed smile of a children's doll. It looked how I felt – namely, a little shell-shocked and not too happy. "Oh," I said. "Shit. Guess I'm up, huh?"

A smile ghosted over the big gray ranger's face. "Even money," he said. "You, or the ten year old."

"Ha, ha. Very funny." I managed to clamber to my feet. "I'm not a very good tracker, and Mags is only slightly better than me. You know that, right?"

He shrugged. "Then ask for one."

I stared at the doll, remembering. "Oh," I said. "That. Right."

"Yes." The ranger's expression didn't change. "That."

I re-wrapped the doll, biting back a sigh. "All right," I said. "I'll find her." I had to, but really, how hard could it be? She was just a kid.

He clapped me on the shoulder. "Good," he said. "Fair winds."

I returned the gesture. "Safe travels."

Mags and I parted ways with the others as the sun was just arcing into daylight. We clasped hands and said our goodbyes. Zigana gave us hugs, and Alaran planted a wet smack on both our cheeks, though he had to stretch up on the tips of his toes to do it. Atuar gave me and Magda each a sweet smile and a depressingly chaste kiss, Vilholm shook our hands again, in a firm and manly way.

In the meantime, Zigana and Alaran had drawn off to one side, a rogues' gallery of two. "Be sure to dress warmly," the woman was cautioning. Her hands were fiddling with the collar of the half-elf's cloak. "You do not dress warmly enough. This is not Calimport. The nights can be bitter here, even in spring. You must-"

The half-elf's hands came up to hold her wrists, stopping her lecture in mid-stream. "Truly, Zig," he said. "I'll be right as rain." He gave her a crooked smile. "I've survived much worse."

The human woman's lips tightened. "Yes," she said. "But that can be attributed to luck - and sooner or later, my dear Alaran, luck runs out."

The half-elf was still smiling. "You'd be a terrible Luckbringer, with that attitude."

Awkward for once, the woman took her hands away. "Yes, well, that is why I am not one," she said. She hesitated, then abruptly leaned forward to brush her lips against his cheek, where they lingered just a couple seconds too long and just long enough for the half-elf's freckles to get swallowed by a ruddy blush. "Be well, dear heart," she said, and turned away just as abruptly as she'd kissed him. I had to look away from his face as he watched her leave.

After the north roads had swallowed all sight of the others, I looked around pensively. The road was close to empty, and none of the traffic was near. This place looked as good as any. "All right. Wait there," I told Mags. "I have to pray."

"Oh." It was almost embarrassing, the look of confused reverence that passed over her face. If she ever met Shaundakul, I was pretty sure that reverence would wear out quick. "Er. Here?"

I shrugged. "Why not?" Then I moved off the road to stand in the meadow grass, wrapped my hand around my holy symbol, and closed my eyes.

 _Hey,_ I thought, casting the thought into the sky and the road and the wind that went through and over them both. _So. You probably know, but I'll tell you anyway. I'm tracking a girl. She's ten. Her father asked me to give her a hand to find her way home. Seems like the right thing to do. But I'm a shit tracker, as you probably also know, so I think I need a hand, too. How about it?_

Nothing much happened. No strange breezes, no voice, no sights that weren't the sights I'd have expected to see on the Long Road a week north of Waterdeep and this close to dawn.

Then, just as I was about to give up, Magda spoke. "Rebecca." Her voice sounded strange. "Look."

"What?" I turned. "Oh."

A wolf was gliding out of a copse of roadside trees. He was a big one, lanky and hulking with shoulders maybe as high as my hips and a bristling ruff of dun-and-grey fur that was just this side of a mane. His single eye was yellow, and the other was permanently shut, sealed with a long pink scar. It wasn't his only scar, either – his fur stood out in tufts where other scars marred his hide.

As I watched, the wolf lifted his leg – and he was definitely a he - and casually pissed on the nearest tree. That done, he turned his head, sniffed, gave a quietly satisfied snort, and trotted up to us with an easy grace. Then he stopped, sat, and looked at me, his ears swiveling forward attentively. He made an odd noise, a near-soundless _whuff_ that was like the prototype of a dog's bark. He seemed to be waiting for something.

A weird feeling of deja-vu washed over me. Slowly, I ran my fingers up the chain of my holy symbol. It caught briefly in my hair as I drew it over my head, and the chain was warm and heavy in my hand as I let it slip through my fingers until the amulet dangled from my hand. "Here," I said, and slowly, carefully, held out Shaundakul's symbol, trying but failing not to feel like a fool. I was talking to a wolf. A wild timber wolf was just sitting in front of me, and I was talking to it like this happened every day. I must have lost my mind. "Is this what you wanted?"

The wolf rose from its haunches and drew closer, stretching his neck out to take a couple of deep whiffs of Shaundakul's symbol. He made a noise – a whine, but with an upwards note, almost like a question – and stared at me. His single eye, seen up close, was alert with an intelligence you didn't often see in most humans, much less anything on four legs. This wolf didn't look like he could talk, but he _did_ look like he could swear, and from the slightly exasperated way he laid back his ears, he kind of looked like he wanted to swear at me.

It took me several seconds to figure out what he was waiting for, then I groped for the bundle Vilholm had given him and fumbled it open. "You want this?" I asked, feeling more than a little stupid, and held the doll out.

The wolf bent his huge head and snuffled the doll. This close, I could see the busy twitch of his grayish-pink nostrils and the fine white tufts of fur at the very tips of his ears. I could also smell him. It was a hard smell to describe, much less experience, but if somebody wanted to come close I thought they could try wrapping a pine bough in a musty old bathroom carpet and ramming the whole thing up their nose.

Eventually, with one last sniff, the wolf chuffed and loped away, nose to the ground. I watched him make a few sweeps, first wide then narrowing, until he seemed to find what he was looking for and stopped for a while before taking off again in a straight line, heading south. About twenty feet on, he stopped and looked back at me. I couldn't be sure, but I thought he looked impatient.

"What?" I asked. "You want me to follow?" The wolf snorted at me. I took a couple steps toward him, and he danced away again before circling back and staring at me with an expression that looked familiar. I thought I'd seen it before on the face of an old math teacher. When I paused, the wolf harrumphed at me in visible impatience, also not unlike my math teacher _._ "Okay. I'm gonna take that as a yes, comma, please follow me, comma, you numbskull, period." I turned. "Hey, Mags, I…wait, what the fuck are you doing?"

Magda had her sword in hand. Her grip on it was white-knuckled. "You expect _me_ ," she said. "To travel with a _wolf_?"

I blinked at her, thoroughly befuddled. "What's this, now?"

The Uthgardt's scowl was deep. "All know that wolves are sneaky, slinking beasts," she growled. "They raid our camps for food and carry off Thunderbeast babes to devour in their lairs. They are not to be trusted."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I blurted. At her offended expression, I waved my hands apologetically. "All right, all right. Sorry. That just popped out. I get it. You don't like wolves-"

Magda sniffed. "It is not that we dislike them," she said. "They are simply evil. That is all."

"So…if you don't dislike them, does that mean that you like them?"

"Of course not. Do not be ridiculous."

"I'm not being ridiculous, I'm being confused." I pinched the bridge of my nose. It wasn't even noon and I already needed a drink. "Look," I said then. "I need to find this girl. Not just 'cause I don't want a dead ten-year-old on my conscience, but it's just…it's what I'm supposed to _do_ , okay?" And even if the prospect of facing a lot of guilt-wracked, sleepless nights if I let down Belorin and his kid weren't enough to light a fire under my ass, and even if I'd had any doubts about what Shaundakul thought I should do, having a wolf show up in answer to my prayer made Shaundakul's opinion _pretty fucking clear_. "It looks like this wolf's here to help, and chances are his nose is better than either of ours. The girl's better off if I take the help I'm offered, because if it were just me? She'd be screwed. So…so I'd rather have you along, 'cause you're better company than somebody who doesn't even talk, but if I have to, I'll make do." She was staring at me. I squirmed. "Hey. If it makes you feel better, you don't have to travel _with_ him," I wheedled. "Just, you know. With me. While I also just happen to be traveling with him."

Magda stared at me a while longer. Then, with an explosive sigh, she shouldered her sword. "You are lucky that I value my friends above the word of the shamans," she huffed. She turned to the wolf and leveled a finger at him. "I will be watching you, wolf. No tricks, or I will have a new fur cape this winter."

The wolf blinked his lone yellow eye at her. Then he yawned, his tongue unfurling between two rows of teeth like picket fences, before rising to his feet and taking off down the road with a flick of his tail.

I shouldered Silent Partner and fell in line, exactly midway between the wolf and the Uthgardt.

Well, this little venture was off to a _fantastic_ start.


	9. Scent

_I see this life, like a swinging vine  
Swing my heart across the line  
And in my face is flashing signs  
Seek it out and ye shall find_

 _Old, but I'm not that old  
_ _Young, but I'm not that bold  
_ _I don't think the world is sold  
_ _On just doing what we're told._

 _I feel something so right  
_ _Doing the wrong thing  
_ _I feel something so wrong  
_ _Doing the right thing_

 _I couldn't lie, couldn't lie, couldn't lie  
_ _Everything that kills me makes me feel alive_

\- One Republic, "Counting Stars"

~*~  
Chapter 9: Scent  
~*~

My booted footsteps echoed on granite. Ahead of me, wolfy nails clicked. Behind me, heavier footsteps thumped.

I felt like I was in the middle of a parade, but not one of the fun ones with 'pride' or 'mardi gras' in the name, one of the awful grade school ones, where everybody just kind of straggled down the road and the band all played at different beats until the French horn player threw up secondhand funnel cake all over the floutist, who burst into tears and threw her flute in a rage, which irreversibly entangled itself in the nearest trombone's slide and led to a sudden and violent altercation in the wind section followed by a six-timpani pileup in percussion. That kind of parade.

Magda spoke. "The Haunted Bridge," she announced sourly. The words came between breaths as she ran. "Gods, but this place makes my hair stand on end."

I looked around. The rolling hills of the Dessarin valley had abruptly collapsed into a boggy, creek-riddled plain, formed in the bend where the river ran inland for a few miles before turning again for its final approach to the sea. I could see hills in the distance to the east and south, and to the northwest, the distant misty teeth of the Sword Mountains, but for miles around us the ground was flat and muddy – except for where we were, where an ancient granite bridge arched high over the bog.

Rumor had it that the bridge had already been old hundreds of years ago, but it didn't show its age. You'd have expected a bridge that old to have crumbled, especially because no one ever seemed to repair it, but this one was flawless. Huge granite blocks blended into each other almost seamlessly, forming a gentle arch that lifted travelers up over the stinking flats and then deposited them smoothly on the far side. Its pylons were perfectly straight, and its cobbled surface was as smooth as if it had been laid yesterday. Neither the bridge's construction nor its size were all that amazing, not for someone from my neck of the woods, but the fact that it was so pristine was. No rust, no crumbling foundations, no pigeon shit, no _human_ shit, and not a single pothole as far as the eye could see. I'd known a few people over at the D.O.T. who would've wept with joy at the sight of it.

"Have you ever heard it speak?" Magda asked.

"No," I said. "And I hope I never do." I expected a lot of things from my transportation infrastructure, but a conversation wasn't one of them.

"They say it speaks in a man's voice, but only to those who are soon to die."

"For someone who claims to hate this bridge, you're definitely talking about it a lot."

"I am nervous. I talk when I am nervous. Besides, if I do not stop talking, perhaps the bridge will not start."

I couldn't really argue with her logic, though I wasn't sure if that was because her logic was good or if I was just as bad at logic as she was. "Well, you might wanna save your breath," I said, nodding at the wolfy tail bobbing about a hundred feet ahead of me. "We're losing ground."

"You see? It is all part of that beast's cunning plan. Soon he will run us to exhaustion and then he will eat our faces and then you will be sorry you did not listen to Magda."

I didn't even bother to dignify that with an answer.

After another couple hundred feet the bridge became road again, and the wolf really started to stretch his legs, forcing us to stretch ours, too. Talking became an impossibility.

Eventually, the river turned and the land went back to rolling. Trees started appearing on our right, a bristle of growth at the base of the Sword Mountains, then thickened into the dense emerald sprawl of the Kryptgarden forest. Another few miles brought the clay rooftops of Westbridge into view, then the timber frame houses themselves.

The sun was just beginning to sink towards the horizon when we reached the village outskirts. The wolf slowed, his nose to the ground. Mags and I dropped gratefully to a walk and followed the wolf as he zigged and zagged and snuffled his way right to the northern edge of town.

The village of Westbridge had no gate, just a guard station close to the road, with a single enclosed room on the ground floor and a stair on the far side that led to a high, open watchtower. As we came close, a whistle came from above, and a man in a chain vest and plain helmet came out of the lower door to meet us. He had his hand on his sword, but he hadn't drawn. "Hold!" he called. "Identify yourselves."

I stopped. To my private surprise, the wolf did, too, dropping to his haunches next to me with his tongue lolling out between his teeth in a very doggy grin. "Rebecca Blumenthal, Windwalker of Shaundakul," I said. I just hoped this guy wasn't into reading. "And Magda of Clan Thunderbeast."

The guard studied me and Magda. Mostly he studied Magda. That was normal. Everything about her – her belligerent posture, her size, her fuck-off sword – demanded attention, if not caution. Around her, everyone else became background - except for the wolf. The guard definitely spared some attention for the wolf. "That beast is your…companion?" the guard asked me warily.

I was almost but not entirely sure he was talking about the wolf, not the Uthgardt. "Sort of," I said, in almost the same instant that Magda said, "No."

The guard looked back and forth between us. "Well," he said. "Which is it?"

Magda subsided into sullen silence. I jumped into the breach. "He's with me," I said. "Don't worry, he'll behave." Or at least, he would for as long as Shaundakul could talk him into it.

The guard frowned at me, his gaze assessing. Evidently, he decided we weren't that much of a threat, because he turned away. "Very well," he said. "Enter, but 'ware that your beast does no harm while here, or it'll be you who answers for it."

"Right." I looked at the wolf. "Hear that, Smelly?"

The wolf gave me a sideways glance and one of his soft _whuff_ s.

"I'll take that as a, ' _Yes ma'am_ ,' then," I said, and continued down the road at a very easy walk. Or maybe a stagger. My legs felt like rubber. I hadn't run that fast for that long in a while.

Westbridge consisted of a few dozen houses, a single crossroads, and a village green with a single tavern. It was also packed with people, more so than usual for a place like this. It looked like a whole lot of travelers had decided to stay put in the village rather than risk the road. If that was the case, I thought we were in for even more trouble than we expected. This kind of crowding meant food shortages and disease outbreaks if it went on for too long.

I followed the road to the village green. It was mobbed, too. People were eating while seated or even standing on the grass in front of the tavern as well as on the tavern's porch and in the coachyard. A couple of barmaids were circulating with food and drinks. It looked like at least some businesses were benefiting from the crisis, which I supposed was a silver lining.

Magda's head turned hungrily to trace the path of a plate of steaming ham go by. "Ah!" she boomed. "Finally! I've a beastly thirst and a worse hunger after all that running." She gave me a slap on the shoulder and the wolf a wary glance. "As _I_ am not traveling with that creature, I think I will go have a drink and see if they have beds for the night. I am tired of sleeping on the ground. _You_ will find me here when you have done…whatever it is you intend to do."

I sighed. At least she'd stopped reaching for her sword every time the wolf looked her way. "Fine. Save some food for me," I said, and hustled off down the road before I could lose sight of my strange, furry guide.

The wolf led me down the east road to a building with a horseshoe sign creaking above the door. There was a work yard out front, with an anvil, bellows, and an adjacent paddock. As we came close, the couple of horses in the paddock looked up, whinnied in alarm, and retreated to the far end of the yard, where they crowded against the fence in a way that suggested that they'd be on the far side of the Anauroch by now if that fence weren't there. Unsurprisingly, their white, rolling eyes were all on my four-pawed friend.

I looked down at the wolf. "Shame on you," I murmured. He wagged his tail, almost as if he'd understood and wasn't the least bit ashamed.

There was a man standing near the anvil, hammer in hand. "Well met," I said, the local form of greeting coming almost easily after a couple years' hard use. "Mind if I take a moment of your time?"

The man stared at me. "While so across the indecisive limpet," he said. "I, I see the squirrel in the corrosive sea. Verily?"

I stared back. _Very funny, old man,_ I thought. _I ask you for a guide, and the guide leads me straight to the village idiot. You're doing this deliberately, aren't you?_ The wind blew my hair across my face, and I swiped it out of the way irritably. "Beg your pardon?" I asked the crazy man.

A laugh floated down the road. I turned to see another man approaching, grizzled and broad-shouldered and sardonic. "Don't bother with him," the man advised. "That's Drull, the farrier. He got kicked in the head a few years back. Hasn't spoken straight since, though he can shoe a horse like nobody's business." He stuck out a hand. "Trystkin. Wagonwright."

I turned away from the village idiot, who didn't seem to feel much need for my half of the conversation anyway, and took Trystkin's hand. "Rebecca," I said. "Pleasure."

"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mistress Rebecca. What can I do for ye?"

I went through my spiel. "I'm looking for a lost girl," I said. "Got separated from her family on the road. Red hair, skinny, about ten. Have you seen her?"

Trystkin scratched his head. "Can't say that I have. 'Course, a lot of people have passed through recently. Easy to miss a little girl in all of the confusion."

I heard a loud chuff, and turned my head to see the wolf pacing around the yard, his nose to the ground. He lifted his head long enough to look at me, whine, and press his nose to the paddock gate, where the horses were seriously starting to freak out. "Oh," I said. "Uh. Are you sure? I mean…have you seen or heard of anything else strange?" The wolf clawed at the fence, and I winced at the frantic whinnying from the paddock. "Like, near the horses? Maybe?"

Trystkin paused. "Well, Drull lost one of his customer's ponies last eve, though it's anyone's guess how or why," he offered. "Some are saying it must have been stolen, though I say it's most like he just left the gate unlatched." He looked around and pointed. "I say. Your beast there seems to be causing an awful ruckus among the horses."

A little desperate, I clapped my hands and yelled, "Hey! Smelly! Over here!" Surprisingly, the wolf trotted right over, his tail held at what I considered to be an inappropriately jaunty angle.

Trystkin's eyebrows shot up. "You named that thing Smelly?"

I shrugged, trying to ignore the aroma of eau de wolf that seemed to be slowly taking up all of the available air. "Seemed like a good name."

The wagonwright wrinkled his nose and coughed politely. "You may have a point," he said, his voice a little strained.

I took the hint. "Thanks for the help," I said, and walked away, the wolf – thankfully - going with me. We got a few odd looks, but not as many as I'd have expected. I supposed enough rangers and druids came through here with their companions that people were used to seeing travelers with wild animals in tow. "So the girl was here," I mused aloud, and looked down, startled, at the wolf's bark. "You know," I said thoughtfully. "I might almost think you understand what I'm saying."

Smelly whuffed again.

"Was that a yes?"

Another whuff.

"All right. What the hell. Let's try this. One bark for yes, two for no. Is the sky blue?"

One whuff.

"Is the sky yellow?"

Two whuffs.

"Well. Shit. Still. That could've been coincidence."

Smelly gave me a slight snort and an exasperated flick of the ears.

I got his point. "Okay. Fine," I said. "So I'm talking to a dog. Fine." Stranger shit had happened. Best just to roll with it. "You think our girl's behind this mysterious vanishing pony?" I asked.

That got one firm whuff.

I grimaced. "Great. So our lost kiddo has about two days' head start and is probably moving faster than us now that she's got four legs instead of two, and somehow we're gonna have to not only catch up with her but also keep her from going to prison for horse theft."

Smelly whined softly.

I sighed. "Yeah. Tell me about it."

I found Magda parked on an old tree stump outside of the tavern, a tankard of a foamy white ale in one hand and, in the other, what looked like a respectable slab of cheese and slice of ham on a thick half-loaf of crusty bread. "Ah," she said as I ambled up. "There you are, little noble." She pointed her meal at the wolf. "Back, you. You are not welcome here." He ignored her in favor of licking his chops and eyeing her dinner. Jumping, she hid it behind her back. "No! Go…go devour an infant or something, would you? This is Magda's food."

I sat down next to her and took the sandwich out of her hands while she was distracted. "Change of plans," I said, swallowing a mouthful of bread and cheese. "We're gonna have to eat and run."

Magda snatched her food back. "Get your own, you bloody savage," she scolded, and ripped off half the chunk of cheese with one wrench of her teeth. "Fine. We cannot stay, anyway. The inn is full," she grumbled, spewing cheese fragments. "What did you discover?""

I tilted my head at the crowd around us. "I'll tell you when we're out of here." There was a girl moving through the crowd with a few tankards in hand and the usual barmaid's getup. I lifted a finger and caught her eye. She made her way over. "I'll have what she's having," I told the waitress. "If you've got any left."

"Aye, though it'll cost you dear, I'm afraid," the barmaid answered wearily. "We've finished the holed cheese and even the vilksmaarg. All we have left is a half wheel of Arabellan cheddar and the hind end of last year's ham."

"Do you still have beer?"

"That we do, and aplenty."

"Then bring me a beer like hers and I'll give you whatever you want for the sandwich." Behind me, I heard a plaintive whine. "Make that two sandwiches."

The barmaid dipped her knees at me, said, "As you wish, m'lady," and swept away.

Magda was licking pork fat off of her fingers. "You are a terrible negotiator," she observed casually. "You know this, do you not?"

I shrugged. "It's just money."

"Hah! Spoken like a true noblewoman."

The barmaid came back with my order, plus a couple other plates on her arm and two more tankards in her hand. I dug beneath my scale vest for my purse and dumped a silver piece and probably way too many coppers into the woman's open palm. She folded her fingers over my coins. "Surely you two aren't traveling alone, are you?" she asked, handing over the goods.

I juggled the mug and two sandwiches. "Why not?" I asked.

"There's been talk of bandits on the road. Some even say the City Guard has mutinied and joined them. It's not safe, even for you adventuring folk. All it takes is one arrow."

I touched Silent Partner, remembering. "Tell me about it," I said glumly.

Magda reached out and patted the girl's arm. "We will be fine," she said. "We are not, what do you call them? Spring hens."

"Chickens," I said. I finished emptying the tankard and held it out, politely restraining a burp. "Thanks. I think I'm gonna need another one of those."

The barmaid took it, bemused. "Well, hens or chicks, you'd best be wary," she warned, and handed me one of the other tankards she'd had clutched in her fist in exchange for another little handful of coins. "M'lady," she murmured again and dipped into a curtsey before whisking off to distribute the rest of her foamy bounty.

When the barmaid was safely out of view, I grabbed one of my sandwiches and threw it behind me. I heard a gnash of jaws and a couple of messy gulps.

Magda leaned back to look behind me. "You are not feeding that beast," she growled. "Tell me you are not."

"Okay." I took a couple long swallows of beer and bit off another chunk of sandwich. I hadn't realized how ravenous I was until I had the food in front of me. "I'm not."

"And now he is eating the ham," my friend narrated indignantly, ignoring me. "That was good ham! Why would you waste it on this vile creature?"

I polished off the crust and brushed the crumbs off my hands before cleaning my hands in the grass as best I could, since I doubted anybody here had heard of napkins. The sandwich had been more like an entire loaf of bread, cut in half and stuffed with filling, but after a day of running and no food but some dried fruit and jerky, I felt like I hadn't eaten so much as I'd thrown the food into a bottomless pit. "That vile creature's been very helpful," I said. "Besides, it's my money, and I'll feed who I want to."

Magda harrumphed. "He's been leading us south," she said, changing the subject abruptly. "I find that suspect. Do you think the girl's truly so daft as to head for Waterdeep, after all her family went through to leave it?"

"Dunno. How smart were you when you were ten?"

Magda's face went blank for a few seconds. Then she slapped her knees, stood, and spoke. "We had best make haste," she said. "That girl is in serious danger."

I finished the rest of my beer, set my tankard on the tree stump, and managed to persuade my tired legs that standing was, in fact, an option. "That's what I thought."

Somehow, we found enough gas left in our tanks to make it back to the road and stumble back into a jog. Smelly picked up the trail, and I gave Mags a rundown on my findings as we went. Her curses floated behind us, rising into the evening air like steam.

She was still going when the sun set and the moon rose, and when the stars came out, and when we finally found a decently sheltered clearing in a little copse of trees and stopped for the night under an ink-colored sky. "Bloody idiot city folk and their bloody idiot ideas," she gasped, leaning her hands on her knees. "And now we must run ourselves ragged because this girl had the poor sense to take up thieving but the damnable inspiration to steal a mount."

I didn't answer. Smelly was circling. I could see the moon-bleached grey of his coat flash as he passed between the trees. There was something about his pose, head down and ears swiveled forward and shoulders bristling, that made me pause. "Smelly?" I asked. "What's wrong?"

The wolf ignored me in favor of slinking to the edge of the campsite and looking out into the dark. A low growl rumbled in his throat. The fur around his shoulders and neck was bristling.

Magda was watching him, the moonlight carving her deep frown even deeper. "Get a fire started," she ordered abruptly. She knelt, opened her pack, and pulled out a length of rope, wrapping it around her forearm as she went. "I will take care of the perimeter."

I looked at the wolf's nervous pacing and couldn't disagree. Fortunately, it hadn't rained, and there were a few white pines nearby with low, dead branches. That was good – dry pine caught easily and burned hot. I broke down some dead branches, gathered brown needles for tinder, tented the driest twigs over a nest of stones for kindling, and dug into my belt pouch for my flint, steel, and tinder box.

Magda paused long enough on her way past to look at me critically. "Not there," she said. She pointed to a place a few feet away, closer to one of the bigger trees, an old beech with a very thick trunk. "There. I want our backs to something and firelight in the eyes of any who try to approach."

I looked. The place she liked didn't look much different to me, but… "You're the strategist," I said, and moved my setup.

By the time she was back, a few tiny flames were climbing up the sticks of kindling and growing into a neat little fire. If you'd asked me four years ago whether I thought I'd be sleeping on the ground more often than not, lighting fires without a match, and facing the prospect of a physical fight without puking or running away, I would have laughed you out of the building and probably all the way down the street. I never really noticed how much things had changed until I thought about it, and then, when I thought about it, I felt almost like I'd lived two lives, and the boundary of their separation was a portal in the park. Or maybe I'd lived three lives – and the boundary dividing this one from the others was in the rubble of a crash-landed city.

Shaking my head, I dismissed my brooding thoughts and bent to blow a little more life into the fire.

With her foot, Mags raked some dead leaves and needles into a pile between the fire and the big beech. Then she sat on her makeshift cushion with her sword across her lap. "Snares and lines are set," she said, her voice low. "If there is indeed someone out there and they try to close on us, they are in for a few surprises."

"You're a peach, Mags," I said. I made my own bed of needles and sat back-to-back with her, Silent Partner laid over my knees. "What would I do without you?"

My friend flashed me a grin. "Die, most likely."

I added a few twigs to the fire. I'd survived a lot of crazy situations since I got to this world, but I didn't think I'd actually been alone for any of them. I'd always had a lot of people and one god watching my back. "Probably," I admitted. "But let's not find out for sure." My stomach rumbled. "I'm still hungry. You?"

"Bloody famished."

I fished a waxed-paper packet out of one of my belt pouches and opened it. Sugar crystals sparkled up at me. "Cloudberry candy?" I asked, before popping one in my mouth and offering the packet over my shoulder.

Magda's fingers plucked the candy out of mine. "With a will."

Smelly had vanished from sight. Not seeing him made me nervous. Magda and I split a handful or two of dried pears and cherries as an impromptu dessert. Then I uncorked my flask and we split a little of that, too. I was grateful for the burn of alcohol. The night had gone a little chilly. Spring might have been in the air, but the ground was still almost winter-hard, even through a few layers of dead leaves. I shivered.

Magda half-turned. "What happened to your cloak?" she asked. "You should not be out at night without covering."

I ate another candy, relishing its sweet, airy crackle. "Lost it."

"How did you accomplish such a thing?"

I shrugged. "Dunno," I lied.

Magda grunted and turned back. "Perhaps we should have stayed in Westbridge for the night," she grumbled. "They might have had room in the stable loft."

"Not with that many people in town."

"It all depends on who you ask. Did you notice that stableman looking at you?"

"No. Which one?"

"The one by the inn-yard gate."

"Him? I thought he was one of the horses."

"Nonsense. He was a fine, strapping specimen. Had you offered, I think he would gladly have warmed your bones."

Like most of the men Magda liked, the guy in question had had a face like the heel of my boot, a voice like he'd been gargling hot asphalt, and so much chest hair that you could have knitted a little doggie sweater out of it. "So would setting myself on fire," I said. "No, thanks."

Magda snorted. "Bah! I will never understand your taste in men. Men should be built to last. The rest is only window dressing."

I smirked. "Yeah, but there's a lot to be said about finding the right curtain rod."

Mags snickered. "Speaking of which, what happened to that pretty ranger of yours from Everlund?"

I grimaced and picked at the patches over my knees. "Yeah, it's funny."

"What is?"

"They say they like an independent woman who doesn't want to settle down, then they start giving you their mom's recipe for mumbleberry pie and asking you what color you want to paint the nursery. Then it all starts going downhill from there."

"Oh. Blast. I am sorry."

I shrugged. "Don't be. The only thing we had in common was that we both liked how he looked, anyway." Besides, he'd been shallow and predictable and a piss-poor conversationalist. Just once, I wanted to meet a man who could surprise me – maybe even one who could maintain a decent conversation longer than he could maintain an erection. But that was probably too much to ask, and anyway, with my lifestyle and my luck with relationships I was probably better off sticking to festhall tumbles.

Magda sighed. "We are not women who live happily ever after, are we?"

I took a last swig of Blackthroat and capped it. "There's no such thing as a happy ending in life," I said. "There's just life, until it ends."

The Uthgardt chuckled. "Wise words from the holy woman."

"Eh." I shrugged one shoulder. "It's probably a load of horse shit, but it sounded good when I said it." And it was good enough, really. I had friends, the freedom to go where I wanted, and the chance to do something meaningful with my life. If the rest of my life looked just like this, I'd have no complaints.

The fire popped. Leaves rustled once, then again. Behind me, I felt Magda tense.

Everything had gone quiet. Too quiet, I realized. I reached into the little reinforced apothecary's pouch at my belt and pulled out a little glass vial full of yellow powder – Farghan's special formulation, with powdered chokeweed and fire peppers to make anyone who inhaled it feel like their lungs were on fire and their eyes were melting, plus some powdered wavy-cap mushroom to send them on a nice little trip to la-la land. I lifted my head and made a note of the wind's direction. The last thing I wanted was to send some of this stuff back in my face.

I waited a few more long, drawn-out moments, tension winding in my chest.

When the noises came, they came one on top of the other, so fast I could barely tell them apart.

First: A twanging sound, a bowstring singing and then a dry thump as if an arrow had just hit the dirt.

Next: A sharp, sudden scream and a loud rustling and cracking as if something heavy had just fallen out of a tree, or maybe shot up one.

Then, right on the heels of that one, I heard a long, rumbling snarl. It was the kind of snarl early humans had probably heard after they stumbled into a cave but just before something terrible happened involving teeth, and it was the kind of sound my human forebrain didn't know but my ape hindbrain remembered, because all of the hair on the back on my neck was suddenly standing straight on end.

The snarl rose in pitch, then buried itself in wet, ragged scream.

The next shout was a man's voice, pitched high with fear. "Stand and deliver!"

Mags and I exchanged glances over our shoulders. I raised my voice. "We're too drunk to stand," I yelled back. "How about we just deliver?"

The man's voice rose. He sounded a little nervous, maybe because that hair-raising growl was back. "Enough! Your money or your lives!" He paused. "We've archers! Be warned! No sudden-"

The rest of his words vanished in a guttural howl, a panicked scream, and a thump.

Magda was already moving, sword in hand, running low. I planted Silent Partner's butt on the ground and used it to swing myself to my feet, whipping the wind around me like a cloak.

A bedraggled, dark-haired man was flat on his back a few paces past the ring of firelight. Smelly was standing on his chest. I could almost feel the rumble of the wolf's growl through the ground at my feet. Saliva dripped from his jaws, and his yellow eye had taken on a greenish sheen in the night-time forest. In the face of that scarred muzzle and those wicked fangs and that fiery one-eyed glare, the guy he was standing on seemed to have decided not to do anything provocative, like moving or breathing. I couldn't say I blamed him.

A crossbow had fallen from the guy's hand. I jumped forward and kicked it away. It spun into the dark. Rage rose in me, sudden and hot. All it would have taken was one bolt, just like Harry – such a small, stupid thing to end a life. "Are you alone?" I demanded. Striding forward, still acting more on anger than sense, I planted Silent Partner's butt at the base of his throat. Power boiled up in mine. " _Answer me_ ," I snarled, my blood suddenly boiling. This was all so fucking _pointless._ This didn't have to happen. People shouldn't have to do this to each other. But here we were, doing it. "Are you alone?"

The guy's eyes rolled up until almost all I saw were the whites. "Y-yes, the others are dead," he gasped. He jerked, as if startled to hear the word come out of his mouth. Then: "Oh gods, please. Call it off, call the bloody thing off!"

I didn't move my staff, though I did spare a flick of the eyes for Smelly. "Him?" I said. "I don't give him orders. He does what he wants." I thought I saw the wolf's tail swish once. "But I'll tell you what. If you're telling the truth, I'll ask him nicely if he's willing to let you go."

Magda's footsteps crashed back through the underbrush. "There were two with him," she said shortly. "A pair of toughs, from the looks of them. One snapped his neck in my snare. The other had his throat torn out. Perhaps this vile creature of yours has its uses, after all."

I didn't look up. "Good to hear it," I said. "You still got some rope?"

Five minutes later, we had the guy tied to a tree. He didn't offer much resistance – not with Smelly hovering close by the whole time.

I stepped back, lowering my staff and pocketing my little vial of choking powder at last. The guy's eyes rolled upwards, and whatever he saw in the branches, it seemed to take the last of the fight out of him. He went limp. "Not another one," he cried. "Not another. Please, let me go. I swear, I meant no harm, I only-"

"Yes, and that crossbow, you were intending to use it to shoot us with flowers and small books of poetry, is that it?" Magda interrupted.

He flinched. "I have no money," he said. "I was desperate. I've hardly eaten in days. Please, just let me go, and I'll never trouble you again, I swear."

The guy was shaking so badly I was half afraid he'd puke. Or faint. The sight of him made my fury fade, until I mostly just felt sick and tired. "Nice idea," I said. "And frankly I'd rather just send you on your way and forget you even existed – but how do we know you won't hurt us as soon as we let you go?"

He flinched again. "You?" His eyes went to Magda, then to the wolf. "You would kill me if I tried."

Magda spat. "Perhaps you ought to have made note of that before you attacked us, you fool."

I studied him. He was wearing a long, nondescript cloak and a rusty chain mail shirt, but the sleeves of the shirt he wore underneath them were fine black cotton with gold trim. "You were a member of the Waterdeep Guard, weren't you?" I asked suddenly.

He twitched. "How-"

"Ex-member, I should say." I reached out and twitched his cloak aside, revealing black-and-gold pants and a pair of black boots in soft, high quality leather. "You've ditched the regulation armor, I can see that, but you probably should have traded your uniform for plainclothes and gotten a cheaper pair of boots. Fancy dress like this kind of stands out."

The guy swallowed. "I...I haven't found anything to replace the uniform," he explained weakly.

"You seem to have found us well enough," Magda retorted. "Have all the tailors hereabouts gone into hiding, that you can find two women camping alone but cannot find a bloody secondhand tunic?"

I shrugged. "Maybe he's just been laying low. If Waterdeep knew he'd deserted his post, they'd hang him."

"If they do not, I will. He abandoned his comrades-in-arms. It is more than he deserves."

The man jerked in his ropes. "No!" he burst out. "I did not...we tried. We tried, but we couldn't-"

Magda's fist yanked him forward against his ropes. "Spare us your excuses," she growled in his face. "You left your battle-mates alone and in danger. You will be lucky if I do not bind you hand and foot and hang you from the walls of Waterdeep, where those you abandoned can strip their repayment straight from your gutless hide."

"You don't understand," the guy said. His words started to run together and trip over each other, they were coming out so fast. "I'd have died if I'd stayed in that city. There are things in the city. They only come out at night, but when they do, death comes with them." He started to sob, big heaving sobs that sent tears rolling down his cheeks and snot bubbling from his nose. "They took Logen," he gasped. "They came from the ground and they took him. Whoosh! Right through a crack in the street. I saw the one who took him. I couldn't help it. I looked right at her. She was a looker, all right. Skin like blackstone, hair like silver, eyes like rubies." He started to laugh. It wasn't an entirely sane laugh. "She was a looker, right up until you looked down and saw what she was like underneath."

Magda and I exchanged glances. "What in the Hells is going on in there?" she wondered. I shrugged, helpless to give her an answer.

The man giggled. "The Hells, aye," he agreed. "That's where they came from. Skitter, skitter. You can even hear them during the day, sometimes. Skitter, skitter. Screams, too, if you listen. Poor, fat Logen. Maybe that's why they took him." He tittered, and it was the sound of a man falling right off the deep end. "Good eating on Logen."

If I didn't get the guy off this subject, his brain was going to snap like a twig – if it hadn't already. "How did you even get past the quarantine?" I asked. "I thought the gates were locked."

The men's eyes twitched towards me. "T-there are tunnels," he explained, his voice maybe a touch steadier. "Under the city. The old sewers. Not safe, but nowhere's safe, now." He sniffled. "You can…you can find access grates all over the city, if you know where to look. Nobody talks about them, but everybody knows they're there. Smugglers use them, and thieves, to get in and out and around the city unseen. I took the one that leads from the sewers beneath the City of the Dead. I was stationed there, on the southern watchtower. That's how I knew of it. It comes out right beneath the domes of the Hall of Heroes – you can see them rise above the walls from the tunnel entrance." He sucked in a shaky breath. "P-please, please, let me go," he begged then. "I have to get away. Far away from here. I did not mean to harm you. I only thought-"

"You thought that we were ripe for the plucking, two women alone on an unguarded road," Magda finished. A sneer of disgust twisted her face. "You thought that you could fill your empty pockets with our gold and be away with none the wiser. All it would take was a threat, perhaps a little blood, but that is well as long as the blood is not yours, eh?" She spat on the ground at his feet. "Coward."

"Yes!" The man nodded frantically. "Yes, I am a coward. I don't want to die. Please, don't hurt me-"

He was a pitiful sight. I didn't know whether to share Magda's disgust or just feel sorry for the poor schmuck. "Don't worry," I sighed. "She's my friend. I'll make sure she doesn't hurt you." I hoped I wasn't lying.

Hope rose in the man's eyes. "And then you will let me go? You won't let her kill me?"

"I won't," I promised. I passed a hand over his face and let power rise from my lungs into my throat. "Sleep," I said. He was exhausted and starving, and there was no fight left in him to resist my command. His eyes slid shut. He slumped, rope creaking as his bonds took all of his weight. I turned to Mags, feeling sick to my stomach. "We'll have to leave him with a spare water skin. And loosen his arm a little so he can drink. It'll be a day or two before anyone finds him."

Magda looked back and forth between me and our captive. "Surely you are not suggesting we let him live?" she demanded. "He is a broken man. Desperate. He will be a danger to all he meets. Better to kill him now." Surprisingly, Smelly chimed in with a single _whuff_ of agreement and an amazingly expressive snort of disdain at our captive. "You see? Even your monster agrees with me."

I went to forage in my pack for a spare skin. "I told him I wouldn't kill him," I said over my shoulder.

Mags followed me. "You told him you would let him go free, as well."

"Yeah, well, I lied about that part. But not about the no killing part." There was a half-full canteen at the bottom of my pack. I stood, canteen in hand. "There's a temple of Ilmater north of Red Larch," I said. I'd always wondered whether they'd known Harry, but since I'd never known his real name and 'little bald monk' described about half of Ilmater's clergy, I'd never been able to find out for sure. No one had recognized the quarterstaff, either. "It's on the way. We'll stop there, let them know where he is. They can take care of him."

"Why not give him to the nearest guards and let them take care of him, instead?"

"They've got their hands full, and anyway they'd probably just hang him for treason."

"Yes. Exactly."

I sighed. "You said it yourself, Mags," I explained. "He's a broken man. Maybe some time with Ilmater will put him back together." Stranger things had happened. I'd been broken once, too, and a priest of Ilmater had helped put me back together. I looked at Smelly. "And what're you looking at? You don't agree?"

The wolf cocked his head, then gave an odd hitch to his shoulders that was eerily close to a shrug and said, louder than words, "Nah, but it's your ass if you're wrong, not mine."

Magda was looking at him, too, with just the barest tinge of approval. "Listen to your beast," she told me. "A wolf knows better than to leave an enemy alive."

I scowled. "Yeah, well, nobody ever called me smart," I said, and crossed to lay my canteen near the sleeping guy's hand. That done, I stood, looking up. I remembered the terror on our guy's face when he'd looked up into the branches, but when I looked I saw nothing but leaves, shadows, and – when the moonlight hit it just right – the glistening threads of a spider's web.

Magda spoke. "What is it?" she said. "What is there?"

"Nothing." I shook my head and turned away. "Come on," I said then. "Put out that fire and let's find somewhere else to camp – further off the road. It's not safe here anymore."


	10. Amphail

_A/N: I've gone back over the last chapters and done minor revisions based on the feedback from a very kind reader/editor. Nothing enormous, but hopefully they should be more polished. Many thanks, and enjoy!  
_

* * *

 _Graceless lady you know who I am  
You know I can't let you slide through my hands  
Wild horses couldn't drag me away  
Wild, wild horses, couldn't drag me away._

\- The Rolling Stones, "Wild Horses"

 _When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers._

\- Oscar Wilde

~*~  
Chapter 10: Amphail  
~*~

A day out of Red Larch, it started to rain.

It was just a light spring rain, but it kept going all through the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. And then, after that, _it kept going_.

Four days out of Red Larch and six out of Westbridge, we finally reached the outskirts of Amphail. The town was nestled into a rippling valley formed by the southernmost foothills of the Sword Mountains. Stands of duskwood and spruce loomed out of the drizzle, and pastures spilled down the hillsides. Amphail's main occupation and source of income was horses, and the smells on the air attested to that - spruce, wood smoke, the sweet hay scent of horses, and the slight funk of horse shit. Distantly, a horse whickered. More distantly still, wings beat, and I looked up to see a winged horse-shape glide across the gray sky, a much smaller, robed figure on its back.

 _A pegasus_ , I thought, and almost laughed in bemused wonder. Once upon a time, I hadn't believed they were real. Now…well, I just hoped this one didn't have to take a dump right when it was over my head.

Magda sniffed, her face sour. "I am not sure which smells worse at this point," she muttered. Mud caked her boots, and the hem of her green cloak was so wet it was almost black. "Us, or the wolf."

I mopped my face with a sleeve and shifted my grip on Silent Partner. The wood was slick and kept trying to slide right out of my hands. "There's an inn here, and a festhall, I think," I said blearily. I remembered stopping by the festhall, once, although that time I'd probably cut loose a little too hard so the details were fuzzy, and most of them involved a pair of blond brothers who'd claimed to be twins and had definitely been into sharing. "We can stop at the first one we see for the night. Take a bath." I lifted my arm, sniffed, and made a face. "A long bath."

Mags grunted sourly. "I suppose it is too much to hope that I might persuade you to call this girl lost to her own folly, so that we may spend the next tenday in a festhall somewhere and drink until we forget this entire ridiculous venture."

"Not really, no."

She sighed. "The things Magda does for her friends," she muttered. "Very well, little noble. But if that is the case, do you truly think we can spare the time to stop?"

I sniffled. My nose was running. I hoped it was just from being cold and not from getting sick. "We'll have to make time," I said. "We can't spend another night out in this."

I was starting to wish I'd asked a few more questions about Belorin's daughter. Who her mother was, maybe. Or, better yet, _what_ her mother was. The girl had to be part demon. It was the only explanation for how she'd been able to stay one step ahead of us all this time, and why we were still here, slogging through the rain without a hot meal or a warm bed in sight.

There'd been another robbery in Red Larch, this time at a food merchant's stall the night before we got there – a big bag of leftover crumblecake and another one of wrinkled apples. This time, at least, the girl had left a few coppers in exchange for the food, and Smelly had found her scent on them. We'd been so close, or so I'd thought.

Then, after the third day of rain, Smelly had lost the trail. I'd never seen a wolf look so depressed. It was almost enough to make me forgive him for the smell, which had taken on a life of its own in the rain. 'Wet dog' didn't even begin to describe it.

Now, we were falling behind, forced to slow down just to avoid breaking our necks on the slippery roads. I could only hope that Belorin's daughter hadn't changed her course, which was a reasonable assumption given how hellbent-for-leather she'd been riding for Waterdeep, and that she'd kept up her thieving streak when she passed through Amphail. A trail of mysterious thefts gave me something to look for, and as long as I had something to look for, I thought I could find her again. I hoped I could find her again. I really didn't want to think about the possibility that I wouldn't find her again. I knew what it was like to be lost and alone in a strange place. I was only alive now because a lot of good people had helped me out. I wasn't a good person, but I couldn't bear the idea of letting those good people - or Shaundakul - down.

 _Now, if only it'd stop raining, that'd be great._

The road narrowed to a cobbled street with buildings looming over them, timber frame and plaster with second storey overhangs that made the road through town feel smaller than it was. Amphail was bigger than Westbridge or Red Larch, more town than village. Guards patrolled, strolling slowly up and down the streets. The street lamps weren't pitch and flame, but were enchanted with the steady white glow of mage light, and their light picked out the names on merchants' placards as the signs swung and creaked in the rain.

I stopped outside one of the biggest buildings. "Mother Gothal's Festhall," I read out loud. The name rang a bell. I reached for the door. "I've been here before. They'll have beds. Let's go in."

On the stage at the far end of the room, a tall, ebony-skinned woman was having a wrestling contest with a big, red-bearded man. People lounged all over, at tables and in chairs or reclining on cushions, in states of dress ranging from fully dressed to naked as jaybirds. Smoke rose in a haze. At one table, a group of people were sharing a hookah, and I thought I smelled the sweet smoke of a cigar. Dice rattled, and cards pattered against wood as someone shuffled a deck. Drinks clinked. Voices talked, laughed, whispered, and, from the confines of curtained alcoves, moaned. Notes fell from a lute, a waterfall of sound that wasn't so much as a song as it was a pleasant backdrop to the rest of the goings-on.

Only three people looked like they weren't here for revelry, two women and a man in boiled leather with longswords buckled at their waists. They were stationed by various doors, stone cold sober and watching for troublemakers. They looked at us, or at least, they looked at Mags and Smelly. Me, they basically ignored. I probably looked harmless – just a tall, roadworn human chick with crazy hair and an overgrown walking stick.

Festhalls had been a happy discovery, something which didn't really exist back home but could be found all over here. They weren't quite taverns, weren't quite inns, weren't quite clubs or casinos or brothels, but were some strange amalgamation of all of the above. A night at a festhall could mean a night of dancing and music, or a night of gambling and gamesmanship, or a night under the sheets with a hired bedmate or a free one or half the festhall if you could talk them into it, or it could just mean a good meal and a comfortable bed. Above all, festhalls were places to kick back, relax, and enjoy life – whatever that meant to you, because the best festhalls catered to all tastes, mundane and otherwise.

A woman approached us – the titular Mother Gothal, if my vague recollection was right. She was past middle age, bottle blonde and blue-eyed, with a fine-boned face that was still beautiful and must have been breathtaking twenty years ago. She wore a silk caftan in midnight blue and gold, belted with a yellow velvet rope, and her hair was carefully styled with elaborate braids. Recognition flitted across her face. "Lady Blumenthal," she said, and gave me a slight bow. If she had any opinions about the travel-worn state we were in, her face didn't betray them. Not even the scarred, villainous-looking one-eyed wolf standing by my side seemed to faze her. "Welcome back to my humble hall." She inclined her head to Magda, her eyes twinkling. "And you, my towering beauty, be welcome here. How may I be of service?"

Evidently I had been here before, which also meant I hadn't misremembered those twins. Idly, I wondered if they were still around. I hoped not. I needed my rest if I was going to be running all day tomorrow. "Evening, Mother Gothal," I said, inclining my head. "We'd like a meal and two beds for the night. But first: please tell me that your baths are still hot."

Mother Gothal's painted lips curved in a smile. "They always are," she said. "Would you prefer public or private?"

"Makes no difference to me, as long as the water's hot," I said. "The past few days on the road have been long ones."

Mother Gothal bowed again, and gestured with one hand. "This way, then, and we shall give those weary bones of yours a good soak," she said, and swept away with the two of us in tow. To my everlasting surprise, Smelly padded after, his toenails clicking and nose and ears twitching at all of the strange sounds and scents.

She led us out of the common room and down a narrow hall, lined with doors. Some of the doors were closed. A few had some interesting noises coming out. One was ajar, and as I passed, I caught a glimpse of a guy wearing what looked like assless chaps, doing something painful-looking with hot candle wax to another guy in nothing but a blindfold and a smile.

The baths were at the end of the hall. Steam enveloped me as soon as I walked through the door. It came from what I could only call a pool, because it was too big to be called a tub. Wooden benches lined the stone walls, and fat tallow candles flickered in niches all around the room, giving it a hazy, mellow light. The pool was big enough to comfortably fit a dozen people, more if they were really good friends or feeling frisky. Most people seemed to have cleared out in favor of other pursuits, but I did see a couple of heads above the water, wreathed in steam.

Mother Gothal beckoned us forward. "I've an arrangement with one of the mages of the Watchful Order in Waterdeep," she murmured, her voice pitched low to avoid disturbing the other bathers. "A tidy little spell which cleanses the water and keeps it piping hot no matter the time or season." She gestured to one of the benches, and to a locker which sat underneath it. "You can leave your garb here, if you wish. I've a laundress who can have it back to you by tomorrow morning." She glided by a row of jars. "These are soaps, oils, powders, and perfumes. Included in the cost, of course." She turned. "Now, it seems to me that you are two very weary women in need of relaxation. May I offer you both a drink? Our steward has recently tapped a cask of Saerloonian glowfire. We also have a good stock of twenty-year dragon's breath, barrel aged. Or perhaps a chalice of sparkling Evermead-"

"I'd be grateful for a glass of that glowfire, if it please you, mistress," Magda said, already unbuckling her breastplate. "I am chilled straight through. Perhaps some fire inside and out will finally warm me."

Mother Gothal inclined her head. "And you, Windwalker?" she asked.

I sat on the bench and began to work a boot loose. It was rough going. My feet were so swollen they felt like sausages about to burst their casing. "I'll take the dragon's breath, please," I said. My boot finally came off with a jerk and a terrible sucking sound. "And one of those cigars I saw going around, if you have any left."

Mother Gothal bowed. She looked at Smelly. "And your…companion?"

I looked at Smelly, too. "I don't know," I said. "How about a nice, juicy steak?" He whuffed once, with enthusiasm. "And a big pillow, I guess, in whatever room you put me in." The wolf's tail thumped the floor enthusiastically. "You can go ahead with her if you want, Smelly. I'll catch up."

Mother Gothal bowed. "At once," she murmured, and swept from the room in a swirl of satin and perfume. The wolf followed her, a development which she accepted with admirable aplomb.

Myself, I felt the exact opposite of soft and nice-smelling. Standing, I peeled myself out of my sweaty clothes. Magda was already ahead of me, having finished divesting herself of the rest of her clothes, leaned her sword against the nearest wall, and begun climbing into the hot pool. I gave up on trying to fold my wrinkled, frayed, and filthy clothes and just crammed them into the locker, piled my pack and my belt with all of its little pouches and other useful accessories on top of them, and propped Silent Partner next to Stormsplinter before following my friend into the bath.

I eased my body into the hot water, my chilled and aching muscles first clenching and then slowly, oh so slowly relaxing. There was a gentle current in the water and what felt like grates on the side where old water flowed out and fresh, hot water flowed in. Chances were that the water was being cycled by magic, not by plumbing, but I couldn't even bring myself to care. I sank into it, inhaling the clean scent of herbs and soap and then letting my breath out in a long exhale that was almost a groan. "Oh, thank the gods."

Magda was almost up to her eyebrows in steaming water. "I will settle for thanking Mother Gothal," she sighed. She nodded at the other people in the pool with us. "Good eve to you," she said politely. "I am named Magda. She is Rebecca."

One was a wiry woman in her late forties or early fifties. Her black hair was short, spiky, and salt-and-pepper at her temples, and her face was handsome in spite of a thin red scar that ran from cheek to hairline. She waved a lazy hand and let it drop with a splash. "Sabetha," she said. "Fair eve to you, too."

The other person, a bearded guy with the symbol of Torm just visible around his neck, grunted acknowledgement without even opening his eyes. Whoever and whatever he was, he seemed to be enjoying his catnap and uninterested in talking.

Mother Gothal came back a few minutes later with a silver tray. The tray held an interesting assortment of things. There was a crystal goblet half-filled with wine that had a perlage like champagne except that the bubbles seemed to be glowing. Next to it was a blown glass snifter that held two fingers of honey-gold brandy. There was also a plate of assorted bread and cheeses and candied fruits, and a thin cigar on a crystal ashtray. Our hostess lit the cigar at one of the candles in its niche, then knelt smoothly at the tub's edge and gave us both our glasses and me the lit cigar. Then she busied herself with collecting our clothes, leaving our armor and packs undisturbed. "Should I send these to be laundered, then?" She lifted my pants, and raised an eyebrow at their patched knees and frayed hems. "Or perhaps mended?"

I was impressed by her politeness. Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash had she suggested sending my clothes to be burnt. "Just laundered," I said. The first draw of smoke into my lungs turned my insides to sweet, toasted marshmallow-ey goo, and the brandy chaser made my toes curl. "Although if you know someone who sells cloaks, I think I'll need a new one." It had been a dumb idea to give away mine, but on the bright side, the guy I'd given it to was probably getting some good use out of it, now that the weather had turned.

The scarred, thin woman – Sabetha, I thought she'd said her name was - spoke up. "You will want to speak with Imbryl, then," she said. "Good needlesmith, and she always has ready-made stock if you've a rush. Her shop's the next house over. Can't miss it."

"Thanks. I'll take a look in the morning," I said, and leaned back, intent on enjoying my smoke, my drink, and my soak.

The woman nodded acknowledgement. Her eyes fell on Silent Partner, propped against the wall. In the candlelight, the zalantar wood seemed to suck in all of the available light, turning the staff into a narrow band of utter black against the pale stone. The only light it reflected came from the mithril end caps, which flickered an eerie silver-green. Then, inevitably, the woman's eyes went to me, lingering on the holy symbol around my neck and then moving to my hair. I hadn't looked in a mirror, but I didn't need to. After a few days in the rain and now this humidity, whatever my hair was doing right now, it was probably outlawed in several countries. "Gods above," the woman said abruptly. Water sloshed as she sat up. "That staff. Are you-"

Briefly, I considered ducking underwater until I drowned. Yet again, Deekin's quill had singled me out for the kind of attention I thought I'd left behind for good. "Yeah," I said, and blew a lungful of smoke out through my nose. "That's me. But I strongly suggest you don't believe everything you read."

Sabetha laughed softly. "Are you telling me that none of it is true?" she asked. She took a sip of her own drink, a flute of something golden and sparkling. "What a shame. Not even those parts where you and that sorcerer-"

I grimaced. "Especially not those," I said, and swirled my brandy before taking another sip. "Xanos would have laughed in my face if I'd suggested anything of the kind."

The older woman wore a look of salacious intrigue. "Are you telling me that this…prodigy among men truly exists?" she asked.

I snorted. "I don't know about the prodigy part," I said. I didn't know how a lizard had learned enough about humanoid sex to come up with some of that stuff, but all of it had come straight from his deranged little lizard head. I loved Xanos, but not like that. We were too much alike in all the wrong ways and too different in others, and anyway he was exactly the kind of hot mess that a wise woman only got involved with as a one night stand, and even then she'd better be ready for some drama the morning after. "But Xanos is real enough, yeah."

Sabetha chuckled, leaning back with her glass carefully upraised over the water. Her smile was wicked. "Nonetheless, I might be tempted to ask you to arrange an introduction."

"Don't get too excited. I have no clue where he is now." Also, I had no idea how experienced Xanos was with this stuff, but he was several years younger than me and he'd spent most of his time at Drogan's indoors with nothing but books for company, so probably not very. I had a sense that if he saw Sabetha here coming after him in full cougar mode, it was even money whether he'd drop trou or run away screaming.

"Oh." Sabetha lips formed a slight moue. "A pity. He sounded like fun."

"Well, he's definitely not a boring person to be around, I can tell you that."

Magda spoke up. "I still do not see why that book annoys you so," she said. Her fingers flickered, undoing her long silver-blonde braid. "It is only a book. What harm can it do?"

"A lot," I answered. "If everyone who reads it expects me to be some kind of heroine who defeats whole armies by shooting lightning out of her ass."

Mags grinned. "What, can you not?"

"If I could, none of you guys would be able to survive sitting in a tub with me, that's for sure."

"Hah! Whatever happened to that kobold, anyway?" Magda asked. Her fingers were working a sudsy lather into her hair. It smelled like roses. "You traveled together for close to half a year, did you not?"

We had, and then I'd drugged his wine and snuck off in the night so I wouldn't have to say goodbye to his face. "We did," I said. "But we went our separate ways after Undrentide."

"Perhaps you should have kept him close so that you could better restrain his errant quill."

"You might be right."

"I _am_ right."

The scarred woman was swirling the last of her wine in its flute. "I think I know what you mean about expectations," she said thoughtfully. "My grandfather and father were fair mages, or so I heard. I hardly remember them, myself. My grandfather died before I was born, and my father made himself scarce until, when I was still quite young, he vanished entirely – whether dead or just bored with the family life, I've no idea. The rest of the family expected me to carry on the tradition, but…" She trailed off, shrugging. Her fingers rubbed the scar on her cheek. "I've more affinity for swords than spells, it seems." I saw a longsword in its scabbard on the bench behind her, together with a suit of chain. "Pays well, though, so they eventually came 'round."

"Mmh." Magda rinsed her hair and smoothed it back. "Expectations are heavy things. Myself, I have not been back to Grunwald for…ten years, is it?"

I looked at her curiously. "That long?"

She grimaced. "I fear so," she admitted. "My mother has gone mad. Each time I return, she presses me on when I will marry and give her grandchildren, before my womb shrivels from age. My father is almost worse. The last time I returned, he had even found a likely mate for me. I nearly had to challenge the man to single combat just to get rid of him." She sighed. "They wish me to stay at home and hearth and give them babies to coo over, and they will not hear me when I say I will not, and I am much happier killing bandits."

The scarred woman shrugged. "To the Hells with 'em," she said. "Your life's your own to live, and you're the one who'll have to live with the choices you make. Best make them good ones."

"I'll toast to that," I said, lifting my glass. Then I drained it and set it on the edge of the bath with a clink, sudsy water dripping from my elbow. "Besides, if you're worried about what to do when you're too old to fight, you could always come work with me."

Magda snorted. "Are you still on about that inn of yours?"

I smiled briefly. "Why not?" I asked. "Sooner or later I'll be too old to keep running to the far corners of the earth. Might as well open an inn, so the people who're still doing it have a place to stay." I let my head fall back, closing my eyes and picturing it. "A nice, big inn with a good cellar, a good cook, and comfortable beds. Nothing fancy. Just a nice, safe place for travelers to come to."

I could see it clearly – a sprawling building with a big room downstairs, all thick wooden beams and warm clay floors and white-washed walls, hung with dried flowers and paintings and shelves full of tchotchke I'd collected over the years. And a big fireplace, the kind you could walk into if the mood took you, with something tasty always turning on the spit above the fire.

There would be long oak tables for noisy communal dinners, gaming tables for those who wanted to pass the night at cards or dice, smaller tables tucked into nooks for private meals, and overstuffed chairs perfect for people to lounge or talk or listen politely as the innkeeper told her old adventuring stories for the billionth time. I figured I should have plenty by then, if I lived that long.

Maybe, if I was lucky, there'd even be a garden for when the nights were warm, hung with lanterns and sweetened with flowers. Then, above, lots of cozy rooms with soft, clean beds and lace-curtained windows that looked out over the garden. I remembered my mother playing the piano at a lace-curtained window overlooking a garden full of roses. I didn't have many memories of her, but I had that one.

I opened my eyes and let the image go. "Someday, maybe," I said. "When my rambling days are over."

The scarred woman smiled. "A fine dream," she said. With a long stretch, she rose, water sluicing from her skin. Her body had obviously seen a lot of years of use, but she still looked lean, strong, and fit. I thought I could do worse than to look like her when I got to her age. "I hope it comes true for you."

Dreams usually didn't, in my experience, but that didn't mean they weren't worth having anyway. "Me, too."

She left. There was a promising lavender-scented soap in one of the jars. I lathered and scrubbed until my skin was pink and my hair had shed about ten pounds of road dirt. Then I relaxed, enjoying the heat and the feeling of being clean after days on the road.

I'd never appreciated being clean so much back home, when I could take as many showers a day as I wanted. Now, I often had to content myself with a sponge bath from a stream or a dip in a lake, and to soak in a tub full of hot water was sheer, blissful indulgence. I wanted to treasure every second of it, to pack the memory away in a jar and take it out when I needed it – like, say, the next time I spent a week traipsing around some forsaken bog until I both looked and smelled like a swamp troll.

Eventually, Magda yawned, then heaved herself out of the bath with a big slosh. "Come," she told me, wrapping herself in a clean cotton robe. She retrieved a comb from her pack, a dagger, arranged two dressing stools so that they sat in a row, and patted one of them before taking the other. "Your hair is a disgrace. Never let it be said that Magda lets her friends traipse about the world looking so bedraggled."

Lazily, I flicked some water at her. "Yes, mommy," I said, and rose from the bath, feeling almost like I'd been reborn into newer, cleaner skin.

Mother Gothal had left some soft cotton robes folded on a big warming brick, so they were nice and toasty. I pulled on one and took the stool in front of Magda. "Do your worst," I told her.

I felt a comb start to pull through my wet hair. "What will it be?" Magda asked. "A nice topknot with sheared sides? A monk's tonsure? Bald as an egg?"

I rolled my eyes. "Do what you want, Mags," I said. "I'll trust you not to embarrass me _too_ much."

Magda's laugh boomed in the empty bath hall, echoing off the tiles. "And you say you are not a hero," she said mockingly. I felt a tug and a yank as she trimmed the first lock. "Hold still, hero. Magda will make you beautiful now."

* * *

A pile of clean clothes was already waiting outside our door the next morning. We dressed, strapped on our armor, settled accounts with Mother Gothal, and left before most of the rest of her customers were awake.

Outside, sunlight slanted between the buildings. Imbryl's Cloaks was exactly where the woman had said it would be. The bell over the door jingled as I pushed it open. A stream of chatter hit me. "And then _he_ said, what about the cucumbers? And she said, well, what about them?" a woman's voice said, and she and the others with her all burst into a flurry of laughter.

Figured that I'd walk in just in time for the punch line and completely miss the actual joke. "Sorry to interrupt, " I said, stepping forward. "Is Imbryl here?"

A broad-shouldered, middle-aged brunette looked up from the counter where she'd been folding clothes. "I'm Imbryl," she said. She looked me up and down. "How may I help you, my dear?"

"I'm looking for a new cloak. Felted wool or oilcloth, for preference. Grey if you have it, any dark color if you don't. What do you have in stock?"

Imbryl's eyes took on the happy sheen of a shopkeeper who sees a quick sale on the horizon. "I have a few things, m'lady. Let's just have a look at you." She came out from behind the counter, touching her fingers to my shoulders and seeming to take a rough measure of me. "Such a tall young lady," she murmured, looking me up and down. Her eyes lingered on the patched knees of my pants. "Are you sure you wouldn't like a new set of britches? I have a pair that another customer never paid for. Fine doeskin, like yours, only somewhat, hmm, fresher. They might be to your measure."

I bit back a sigh. What was it with people and my wardrobe? "Nah, I'm good." I'd spent enough money on fashion in my life, and now that I no longer had to dress to impress, I'd be damned if I gave a damn. People were just going to have to take me as I was. "Just the cloak, thanks."

Imbryl pulled out a few cloaks and helped me try them on. It brought me back to all those hours of my life I'd spent being fussed over by fashion consultants and stylists and tailors in their tastefully small and fantastically expensive boutiques - complete with the steady current of not-altogether-friendly gossip. "You'll want to watch your purse these days," she advised me, swinging a dark gray, ankle-length cape with a deep hood over my shoulders. "There's been a rash of thefts. My dear friend Halana – I do not know if you've met her, she's gone rather plump these days but she does have marvelous hair – anyway, she had a plate of freshly baked pasties stolen right from her windowsill two mornings ago, and while that's common enough, Elraghona Selember had a fine mare go missing from her paddock the other day, as well." She clucked her tongue. "No doubt it's the doing of those refugees. What a sorry mess of folk, and such a sad state the city has come to, isn't it? All of those _people_. Well, I'm sure the Lords will handle it. They've put forth a reward, I hear. No doubt reams of adventurers will heed the call and save us all once again. Better that than drinking all of our ale and vomiting in the streets, hmm?" She adjusted the hang of the cloak. "There. How's that?"

Magda and I exchanged glances. "Great," I said abstractedly. I reached inside my armor for my coin pouch, which was feeling lighter these days. Not that it mattered. I lived light, and Mom's jewelry, now sewn into a hidden pocket in the lining of my pack, was enough to keep me going for years if I was careful. "I'll take it." I'd have taken anything just to get out of there. I felt like I was suffocating.

"I do not believe it," Magda said once we were outside and back out in the fresh air. "Are you certain this so-called ten-year-old child is not some manner of demonspawn?"

"I've been wondering about that, myself," I said. I stuck two fingers in my mouth and whistled. Smelly appeared from around the corner and joined us, panting lightly. "Nice to see you, you stinky old cyclops," I greeted him. "Eaten anybody's sheep yet this morning?" He chuffed twice. "Great. Thanks. I appreciate you not making the whole town angry at me. So, how do you feel about having a sniff around?" His ears perked up, and he looked around expectantly. "Well, come on then. Let's schlep."

Selember's Horses was a small cottage with a big pasture out back. Horses of various colors, ages, and breeds were out grazing on dew-dampened grass. The Mistress Selember herself, a dark-haired woman in a plain shirt and pants and very high boots, was in the stables, mucking out a stall. She leaned on her pitchfork as we approached. "Good morn to you ladies," she called. "Can I be of some help?"

I put one boot up on the fence middle rail and folded my arms on the top rail. Nearby, Smelly trotted down the fence line, nose to the ground. "Well met, Stablemistress," I said. "But I was actually hoping to be of help to you. I hear one of your horses got stolen."

The woman laughed shortly. "That it did," she said. "Though I also gained a horse, so on the balance, I'm not sure if 'stolen' is the right word for it."

I blinked. "Come again?"

The woman pointed. "See that pony?"

It was the only pony in the whole paddock. "Yeah…oh." The penny dropped. "Oh, no. That's not your pony, is it?"

"Indeed, it is not," Mistress Selember agreed drily. "It turned up the night my mare, Daisy, went missing – two nights ago, now." The stablemistress scratched her cheek. "It's a poor exchange, but I'd mostly like to know who has my poor, sweet, stupid Daisy. She _would_ follow anyone for a carrot, the daft beast."

"Yeah," I said. A loud whine floated down from the paddock gate, where Smelly was pawing frantically at the wood. I sighed. "About that..." I explained about Nat. Mistress Selember listened. Her eyes grew wider and wider until finally, she threw up her hands. "Ten gods!" she exclaimed. "Had I known, I might have given her the beast for free. That poor little lass, lost and alone. Why didn't she just _ask_ me? I'd gladly have put her up and seen her on her way."

I was starting to wonder exactly how much pity I should be feeling for this Nat versus how much I should be feeling for everyone _else_ Nat came across. "Well, the good news is, if we can find her, we can probably bring Daisy back." Assuming the innocent little tot hadn't exchanged the horse for a kilo of cocaine the next town over, of course. I hopped down from the fence. Judging by the stampede that was starting to form, Smelly wasn't compatible with horses, and it was high time we left. "Thanks for your help, stablemistress."

Neither Mags nor I were surprised when Smelly led us straight to the southern edge of town. The girl was still hellbent on going south, and I didn't think she meant to make for Daggerford.

"Two days," Magda said. She spat over her shoulder as we ran. Stormsplinter was riding in its scabbard across her back. "How? How does this child move so quickly?"

"Hell if I know."

"What do we do if she makes it into the city?"

I gritted my teeth. "She won't," I said. "Not with the quarantine. Even this kid's not _that_ sneaky."

"But if she does?" my friend insisted.

The Long Road stretched ahead, descending into the plain of the Dessarin delta. Ahead, Mount Waterdeep clawed at the blue sky, bald and craggy. Its eastern side bore faint, regular lines and notches where stonemasons had carved terraced streets right into the mountain. "She won't."

Mags held out her hand. "Bet you a silver coin?"

I clasped hands with her. "Oh, you're on."


	11. Mountain

_A/N: Hey, everybody! I just discovered Magda's real-life doppelganger. Do a Google image search for "Marte Elverum", mentally add a foot or so of height, and wave hi to Mags!_

* * *

 _Oh baby there ain't no mountain high enough,  
Ain't no valley low enough,  
Ain't no river wide enough  
To keep me from getting to you babe._

\- Marvin Gaye, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"

~*~  
Chapter 11: Mountain  
~*~

Magda held out her hand. "Pay up," she said.

I stared at the River Gate of Waterdeep. The portcullis was down and the distant figures of guards swarmed it like ants. Smelly was pacing and looking at the gate, an urgent whine coming from his throat. "Damn it," I said, and dropped a silver coin in Magda's palm.

She pocketed the money. "What do we do now?" she asked.

My eyes traced their way up from the gates to the city on its mountain. Waterdeep itself didn't _look_ that bad. I'd expected a war zone, complete with smoke and explosions and piles of corpses, but the city looked peaceful enough from here. If there was any sign of trouble, it was in the pale winged shapes circling above the city – Waterdeep's Griffon Cavalry, out in force. "We go in," I said. "We find her. We hustle her out before sundown. No detours, no stops, and _definitely_ no getting into a fight if we can help it."

"No fights?" The Uthgardt pouted. "You never let Magda have any fun."

"If you listen to rumor, nobody in Waterdeep is having fun right now."

"Pah." She dismissed the inhabitants of Waterdeep with a single swipe of her hand – all hundred-odd thousand of them. "City dwellers. Anyone who spends his life hiding behind a wall deserves to die behind one."

"Yeah, well, don't underestimate those walls. Somehow we have to get past them ourselves."

"How do we get in, though?" Mags thought for a second. Her face brightened. "I know! We will kill all the guards under cover of night."

I sighed. "They're just doing their job, Mags," I said.

"So?"

"So we don't kill fifty men just for doing their job, Mags."

"Hmm." The Uthgardt pursed her lips. "Perhaps you are right. Besides, those guards are only runty little men, but there are many of them, and is there no guarantee that I can kill them all."

"No kidding. Do you know how many crossbows are up there right now? They could fill you full of bolts before you even got close."

"Of course. That is why I said we should do it at night, when they will not be able to see us."

I saw people in robes patrolling the battlements. "They'll have their wizards cast light spells as soon as the first man dies, Mags."

Magda paused. "Bugger," she said. "You are right." She spat. "Bloody wizards." Then she gasped and grabbed my arm with both hands, pumping it up and down. "Wait! Wait! I have it!"

I let my arm be manhandled, reflecting on the fact that it took a lot of patience to be friends with my friends. "What?"

The Uthgardt gripped my shoulder in one hand. With the other, she pointed triumphantly at the gate. "We shall go to them and tell them that you are a great hero! The Lords have announced an award for any hero who comes to save the city, you heard the woman say it. The guards are bound to let you pass if they think you are a great hero."

I was pretty sure they could hear my teeth grinding all the way up at the gate. "No."

"But-"

Wind filled my lungs, making my voice crack over the hill. "NO."

Magda blinked. Then she sniffed. "Very well," she said. "Then I will tell them that _I_ am a great hero, and you shall be my standard bearer."

"Standard? Honey, I've seen the kinds of guys you sleep with. You _have_ no standards."

She barked a laugh. "And you have too many standards, which is why you sleep alone most nights and are always in a terrible mood."

I laughed, too. "Ouch."

She punched my shoulder. "Come, now. It is the only way. Unless you would like to try the sewers?"

I tried to imagine the smell of a sewer in a place with a couple hundred thousand people and no mass sanitation. "Ugh. Okay. Fine." I put my hand on her back and gave her a light push forward. "Go tell everybody what a big deal you are, Thunderbeast. I'll follow."

She rolled her eyes and started to walk. "I am going, I am going."

The guards' eyes were already on us as we crossed the last few hundred feet to the gate. When we were within shouting distance, two of them raised their crossbows, and a third one shouted, "Hold!"

Magda held, and I held, too: onto the back of her breastplate, just in case she decided to charge at the last minute.

My friend glanced back at me, then grinned, winked, and raised her voice to an ear-splitting bellow. "Hail the city!" she called, and struck a dramatic pose. "It is I, Magda Thunderbeast! The Scourge of the Black Hand Band! The Bane of Banditry! The Margravine of Mayhem!"

"Oh, come on, you totally made that last one up," I muttered under my breath.

"Shut up," my friend shot back out of the corner of her mouth. "It is working. I can feel it."

The guardsman who'd spoken leaned out over the crenellations. His voice came down to us faintly. "Sorry," he said. "Who?"

Magda stiffened. "What? What do you mean, 'who'?" she barked, pounding her chest with her fist. "Magda Thunderbeast! She who fought the Black Hand Band on the Evermoors, and slew their chieftain in single combat! She who almost single-handedly saved Nesme from a troop of marauding undead at the Battle of the Ten Coins! With the assistance of the noble Windwalkers of Shaundakul, I most recently eliminated the Blacktooth bandits from the Evermoor Way!"

 _With the assistance?_ I almost swallowed my tongue.

More guards were gathering at the lookout point above the gate. The wind carried a hurried conversation down to us. "Did she say Thunderbeast?" one guard was asking.

Another snapped his fingers. "Oh! Oh, is she that-" He trailed off. "Blast, what was her name?"

"Marta something, I think," another offered.

"Right! Marta Thunderfist, that was it. Now, _that_ woman's a hero. Did you hear what she did to that necromancer hiding out on the High Moor last year?"

"No, what?"

Mags snapped. "Oh, to the Hells with it," she growled. She reached back, grabbed me by the shoulders, and dragged me forward. "You, men! Listen here-"

My heels dug into the turf. "Oh, hell no!" I yelped.

Mags was stronger than me, and held on. "This!" she boomed, turning me to face the gate fully. "This is Rebecca Blumenthal, Windwalker of Shaundakul and Heroine of Undrentide! She who single-handedly-"

I gave up on struggling. "Would you stop with that single-handedly shit?" I hissed over my shoulder.

My friend raised her voice a little more. "-single-handedly, I say, slew Heurodis, the sinister medusa who was once the apprentice to the dread lich Belpheron, as that villain sought to raise the ancient magics of Netheril-"

I closed my eyes, quietly chanting, " _Please shut up, please shut up, please shut up_ …"

Mags finished in a reasonable imitation of a drill sergeant's bellow. "-AND ESTABLISH HER EVIL DOMINION OVER THE WORLD!"

I winced and fell silent. Really, there was nothing I could say to make this better and no way it could get worse.

Above our heads, another consultation was happening. "That's her? Huh. She don't look much like her picture," one guy observed.

"You mean the one in chapter twenty-three?" Another, a woman, sighed lustily. "What a chapter."

"Aye, there ain't a strong resemblance," one of his friends agreed, peering over the wall at me. "The staff's right, mind you-"

"Oh? Is it blackwood and mithril? Move over. I can't see from here."

"I think it might be blackwood, but aren't heroes usually…clad in shining armor and swirling cloaks and mysterious enchanted jewels and all?"

"So?"

"So why's she dressed like _that_?"

"Maybe she's fallen on hard times. Don't be so judgemental."

"I'd have expected her to be taller," a third guy chimed in.

"Aye, and more, you know…" The first speaker held his gauntleted hands in front of his chest. "You know?"

I could have wept. Of all of the attributes Deekin could have given the fictional me, he'd just _had_ to go with the gigantic gazongas.

The debate went on. "No, if either of them's a proper hero, it's the fat blonde one, not the skinny brown-haired one."

Magda spasmed. "Fat?" she screamed, and slapped her bicep. "This is all muscle! Muscle, I say! Who are you calling fat, you flabby old hag?" She started forward.

I'd been wrong. This could get worse. "No!" I barked. Somehow I managed to jump onto my friend's back and get my arms and legs around her before she'd gone too far. She staggered forward while I clung to her like a demented sloth to the branches of an angry treant. "No fighting, Mags! You promised!"

Mags spun in a circle, flailing as she tried to swat me off her back. "I did no such thing!" she roared. "Get off of me! Those louts called me fat!"

"Yeah, well, they called _me_ badly dressed!"

"That is because you are!"

"Oh, hey now-"

The lead guard clapped his hands sharply. "Oy!" he yelled. "You might even be who you say you are, but it makes no matter. We've orders to let no one past these gates. No exceptions except with prior authorization from the Lords themselves." He didn't even bother to raise his crossbow, just pointed down the road. "Now, be off with you both. It's not safe to be near this city after sundown."

The walk back down the road was silent until were out of sight of the gates. "Well," I said then. "That was a total failure."

Smelly flopped down in the grass, put his paws over his snout, and sighed – whether from embarrassment or despair, I couldn't say.

Magda joined him on the grass. "Agreed," she said. Then she began to laugh – a big, hearty belly laugh that echoed out over the road.

I gave her a long-suffering stare. "This isn't funny." Magda fell over backwards, still hooting with laughter. I gave up and sat down beside her. "What now?"

She subsided. "What else?" she asked. "As it seems that heroism counts for nothing these days, we must sneak in through the sewers like thieves."

I looked down the length of the Troll Wall. Distantly, I thought I saw black gashes in the rock – crevices, maybe, or caves. I sighed. "I was afraid you were going to say that."

* * *

Magda's voice echoed up from under the street. "Pull!" I heard a grunt. "Why aren't you pulling?"

My hands grappled for a grip on loose skin and coarse fur. "I am pulling! Why aren't you pushing?"

"I _am_ pushing!"

Claws scrabbled on pavement and finally found purchase. A shaggy, gray-furred shape heaved out of the sewer grate like a smelly leviathan breaching the deep. I fell over backwards, my back hitting the street with a jangle of scales. Smelly staggered a few paces away and collapsed, panting heavily.

A few seconds later, a blonde head popped above street level. Several wisps had come loose from Magda's braid, and her face was smeared with…something. Best not to wonder what. "Finally," she huffed, and hauled herself out, sword clanking on the cobbles. "Explain this to me again. Why did we just have to push a seven stone wolf up a fourteen span ladder?"

"That sounds like the start of a joke," I wheezed. "Okay. Got it. So, a wolf, a ladder and an Uthgardt walk into a bar-"

"Notice that I am not laughing."

I tried to sit up. "Yeah, well, we still need the wolf along."

"Why?"

I stood, a little lopsided. I thought I might have pulled something. "Because he's the only one who can sniff out Belorin's kid."

"Hah! After that stench, it will be a miracle if he smells anything ever again."

Smelly pawed his nose and whined agreement. His fur was standing up in sticky, spiky clumps. Best not to wonder what was in those clumps, either.

"Look on the bright side," I said. "At least we're here."

Magda managed to stagger to her feet. She looked around blearily. "Yes," she said. "But where is here?"

I looked around. Narrow timber frame buildings were packed in tight all around us, five or six stories high, and above them only a sliver of sky was visible. "Looks like the end of an alleyway," I said.

My friend rolled her eyes. "I can see that," she said. "But which alleyway, and on which street?"

"How should I know? Do I _look_ like an interactive map of Waterdeep?"

"You are a priestess of Shaundakul. You are the one with the direction sense. Use it."

"There's a big difference between knowing which way is north and knowing the name of the street we're on, Mags." Nonetheless, I closed my eyes, feeling for that subtle but steady tug, the power in me reaching out towards this world's pole. "North is…" I turned. "This way." I opened my eyes and started to take a step. Then I stopped short, abruptly. "Oh. Heh. Whoops. Who put that wall there?"

Laughter burst over the silent alleyway like a flock of startled pigeons. Magda's shoulder hit the wall of a house, her whoops of laughter just about knocking her over. "Gods love you," she gasped. "You magnificent imbecile." She staggered forward and draped an arm over my shoulders, still laughing. "Come. Perhaps we should look for a street sign, instead."

I looked at Smelly, who had his tongue lolling out and was snorting erratically in a way that bore a distinct resemblance to laughter. "You two go on ahead," I said. "I think I'll stay here and take a nap."

"No you will not," Magda said, steering me towards a gap in the houses. "You and I have work to do. You must save a young girl from this vile city and return her to her father, and I must help you because you are my friend."

Smelly's snorts had graduated to hoarse chuffs of amusement. With friends like these, who needed enemies?

The alley was just wide enough for Magda's shoulders, and it spat us out on a street that wasn't much wider. The street descended to the northeast and sloped up to the southwest. The street was half cobblestones and half dirt, still muddy from days of rain. Above us, more sky had opened up, gray and threatening rain. Past a row of steep roofs, more streets and houses climbed the terraced sides of Mount Waterdeep.

There was something else, though, something that loomed even larger over the streets than the mountain did. I'd been to Waterdeep once, and while it wasn't a city the way I thought of cities, a sprawling beast of metal and concrete with a roar like a freight train by day and a skyline like a galaxy by night, it had still been a city, and if there were fewer people than back home they were all jammed into a much tighter space, making Waterdeep noisy and messy and vibrant.

Now, Waterdeep was silent.

The streets were empty. No criers shouted the latest news. No merchants hawked wares. No kids were running, no revelers laughing, no street magicians spinning illusions, no buskers serenading passersby up for a few coppers, no beggars begging, no outlandishly-dressed adventurers making the tourists gawk, and no residents hanging out of third floor windows to have a screaming match with somebody on the street below.

The houses were dark. Windows were shut and shuttered. Boards were nailed across doors. Trash had piled up in the angles where the houses met the sidewalks. Every so often I heard a noise – a clink, a murmur, a rustle – but somehow those hints of human occupation only made matters worse, because they sounded a little too much like the faint scrabbling of hunted animals gone to ground.

I stepped carefully out into the street, Silent Partner at the ready and a hard knot forming in the pit of my stomach. Black stains streaked the wall of a nearby house, and not far from where we stood, part of the street was cracked and buckled, as if something had torn through the cobbles.

There was a plaque on the wall of the house at the corner where the alley met the road. "Quill Alley," I read, keeping my voice low. Breaking the silence seemed like tempting the gods - and even as I had the thought I wondered when I'd started thinking about the gods as a multitude, and when I'd started thinking of them as real things, and when, above all, I'd started to dread tempting the nastier ones.

Magda was peering both ways down the street, her sword in her hands. The silence seemed to have gotten to her, too, because her voice was uncharacteristically hushed. "Is that the street we are on or the alley we just came out of?"

"I'm not sure." To the southwest, the street widened and became what looked like a crossroads. I followed the row of houses to the corner, where a tall granite building took up most of the block. The building had colonnaded windows all along the front and an enormous, iron-bound wooden door, now very closed. Above the door was a huge carving of an eye, a candle, and a quill, and a metal plaque below it read, 'Most Noble Order of Scriveners, Clerks, and Cartographers'. "Huh," I said. "This is the Zoarstar. I know some folks who've gotten their maps from here." I'd never known how much there was to know about maps until I'd started spending most of my time around professional travelers. Kelavir alone could probably go on for hours. "That puts us in the eastern Trade Ward, at least."

Mags grunted. "Good. Do you know where to go?"

I looked around, trying to get my bearings. "Maybe," I said, and made my way to the intersection, sticking close to the edges of the street. Another plaque gave me the name of the crossroad: Wide Way. I didn't remember this road from my first visit, but I knew that Virgin's Square, where Belorin had said he had his house, was near the fork where the Way of Dragons met the High Road. If we were near the City of the Dead, that meant I just had to keep going west until I found the High Road. Then I could…well, then I could hunt around for a familiar landmark, because I couldn't quite remember what roads led where.

We followed the Wide Way, past Slipstone and Sleeper's Lane, to where it finally yawned onto the High Road, one of Waterdeep's main thoroughfares.

The High Road was as wide as a boulevard, although not nearly as straight – nothing in Waterdeep was straight, which was what happened when you built a city on the slopes of a mountain. The road was also as quiet as a whorehouse at high noon. There were dark splotches on the stones that the past few days of rain hadn't been able to wash away, and scorch marks on some of the buildings. Further down the street in both directions, I saw blockades. In the quiet, our footsteps echoed, despite my best efforts to step softly. "By the gods," Magda said. "What has happened here?"

"Don't know," I said. "Don't care." I was here for one thing, and it wasn't to save the whole city, it was to find one kid and get all of us back out of here safely. Casting around, I saw a landmark I thought I knew, a weird three-sided building rising at the intersection of the High Road and Way of Dragons like a ship's prow. "Look – there's the stationer's guild. We're close."

A cut in the wall of buildings led us onto Scroll Street, west. We passed lines of still houses and the House of Light, home of the glaziers and candlemakers and now standing with its windows dark and empty, before we reached the broad plaza of Virgin's Square, with its raised dais surrounded by benches and tables where merchants and mercenaries came to settle terms, only a lot of the benches were cracked and the tables overturned.

On the west side of the square, guards were heaving bodies into a burning house. One of the bodies wasn't human and had too many long, black, articulated legs, and one of the guards, a guy in the tabard of a Watch sergeant turned to look at us as the _thing_ they'd thrown started to go up in smoke. "You!" he yelled, barely sparing us a glance. "You should not be on the streets. A curfew has been called." He swung an arm, shooing us. "If you plan to fight, go to the Yawning Portal. If you do not, go to your homes. It's worth your lives to be out here."

I usually tried not to argue with armed men without a damn good reason. "We'll be gone soon, officer," I said. "Our house is just down the street." At least, I hoped it was.

"Then go to it, gods save you, and bar the cellar door stoutly, if you've any sense," the man answered. "There's things under the streets no soul ought to encounter under the living sun."

I looked up at the sky. The sun was hiding its face behind the clouds, but I didn't think even the clouds wanted to see what was happening here. Neither did I, but hopefully it wouldn't be long yet before I was out and on my way to a place where the streets didn't look like a graveyard.

We moved on. Smelly paced ahead of us, ranging back and forth like he was hunting. When he reached the south side of the square, his ranging and sniffing became narrower and narrower, until he seemed to be following some invisible thread. The wolf led us across Simple's Street, which bounded the southern end of the square, and into a warren of tall houses, where he stopped in front of a small two-story building and pawed at the door.

I looked. The front of the house had a red-painted door, a cobbler's signboard, and a bay window with empty shoe displays on the deep sill. "Keep your eyes peeled," I said, and reached out to turn the handle. The handle turned easily – the door was unlocked. It swung open smoothly on well-maintained hinges.

Inside, the shop was empty – empty tables, empty display cases, empty shelves. Dust covers had been thrown haphazardly over some of the furniture, like the owners had left in a hurry. Behind the counter there was a curtained doorway. I used Silent Partner to push the curtain aside. Nothing jumped out at me, so I risked a peek. The room beyond was long and narrow. About half of it was taken up by a tidy workbench that still held show forms of all sizes and pots of glue and dye-stained rags and other things I couldn't even identify. A rack above the workbench held stacks and stacks of soles and laces, while a couple of high leaded windows let in weak light. The other half of the room consisted of a wooden stairway that ended at a second floor landing and a door. There was what looked like a basement door under the stairs, but there was enough furniture piled in front of it that we would have needed a moving crew just to get to the doorknob.

A gray-furred shape slipped in behind me and slunk towards the stairs, sniffing. At the bottom of the stairs, the one-eyed wolf craned his head to look at me. When I met his eye, he looked away and silently pointed his snout upwards, at the second story door.

That seemed clear enough. I stepped past him, touching his ruff lightly. "Thanks, Wayfinder," I said. The wolf made a noise low in his throat that was eerily like a breathy chuckle, and his tail swished once, which I decided to take as, "You're welcome."

The stairs creaked under my weight, and the upper door opened easily. I stepped through it into a homey kind of room, obviously the private space of the family who'd owned the shop. It had a kitchen area with a wood-burning stove, a half-empty crockery cabinet, and a big wooden trestle table. On the other side there was a sitting area with comfortable chairs and pale outlines on the floor where an area rug used to be and a wall of display shelves, still occupied by a few scattered books and knick-knacks. It was a little poky, but the floors were polished and well-kept hardwood, there were a couple oil paintings on the walls, the furniture was good quality, and the display shelves implied that the owners had had enough disposable income to buy and display a few pretty things. There were windows on the north and south walls, facing onto Simple's Street to the north and some kind of courtyard to the south. To the east was an arched doorway leading to a dark hallway.

A cool, damp breeze whispered across my skin. One of the north windows was open, just a crack. The floor in front of it wasn't wet or water-stained, which meant the window probably hadn't been open during yesterday's rain. "Hello?" I called. "Anybody there?" No answer.

Mags crossed the room. "Bah. This place is abandoned," she said, jiggling her foot impatiently. She stood in front of the hallway, peering in. "Perhaps-"

Whatever she meant to say was cut off by a noise from somewhere down the dark hall – a rattle and a creak that was as foreboding as the sound of a gun being cocked.

The sound sent a jolt through me. "DOWN!" I shouted, and dropped to the floor just as I heard the unmistakable _thunk_ of a fired crossbow echo through the empty house.


	12. Spider

_The itsy-bitsy spider  
Climbed up the water spout  
Down came the rain  
And washed the spider out_

 _Out came the sun  
And dried up all the rain  
And the itsy-bitsy spider  
Climbed up the spout again_

~*~  
Chapter 12: Spider  
~*~

I threw myself down in a clatter of scales. From the corner of my eye, I saw a grey blur rising, leaping, falling. Mags cried out. Bodies hit the floor, hard.

 _Thunk._ The bolt sang over my head and buried itself in the far wall.

I rolled over. "Mags," I yelled. "Are you-" I caught sight of her and sagged in relief. "Oh, thank god."

The Uthgardt was on the floor. Smelly was crouched over her protectively, his ruff standing on end. "I am fine," she growled, and shoved at him. "Now tell this malodorous hooligan to get off of me!"

The wolf's jaws parted at her briefly in his silent, doggy laugh. He looked up, ears twitching and single eye alert. Then, all at once, he barked, jumped off of her, and bounded down the hallway. A high-pitched yell echoed back. "Go away!" it shrieked. Something hit the floor with a clatter. "Ow! No! Let go!"

"Hellfire!" Magda did some kind of crazy forward roll that took her from sprawled to standing in the blink of an eye. Before I could stop her, she was dashing down the hall after the wolf. "Stop, you! Hold right there!" A moment later I heard a scuffle, followed by a string of curses from Mags and a long, high-pitched, childish scream of protest.

I got to my feet with more stumbling and less grace than Mags, then took off after them. "Wait! Mags! What the-" I got to the end of the hallway and stopped. "-fuck?"

Magda was standing in the middle of what looked like a bedroom, grappling with a scrawny girl with tangled red hair. She'd hoisted the girl off of her feet and now held her fast, one forearm clamped over the front of the girl's shoulders and the other wrapped around her waist. The girl was fighting for all she was worth, kicking and heaving and clawing at the Uthgardt's armored forearms, but Mags had about two feet and I didn't know how many pounds on her, so it wasn't going well for the kid. "Be still, you little spider monkey!" Magda roared. The girl writhed and tried to bite her on the wrist. Mags shifted her grip and lifted the girl higher, laughing. "Hah! You have a warrior's spirit! Good! Now stop trying to bite me, or I'll tie your arms in a knot!"

The girl let loose another ear-piercing shriek. "Let me go!" she shouted, squirming. "I'm warning you, let me go, or-"

Mags chortled. "Or what? You will defeat me in single combat?"

"I almost did!" the girl spat. "I would have gotten you, too, if you hadn't ducked!"

"Why, you little-"

I decided to step in before Magda lost her temper and committed infanticide. Not that I could blame her. "You must be Nat," I said. "Your dad sent us." He hadn't actually mentioned that what his kid needed wasn't a rescue. It was an exorcism.

At last, the girl stopped trying to bite through Magda's bracers. "My father?" she said. Her eyes narrowed. "No. You are lying."

I sighed. "His name's Belorin Kulenov," I said. "His grandfather was a tanner. He's a cobbler. He left Waterdeep with you and the rest of your family to go live with your aunt in Yartar after your cousin died. You all got ambushed by bandits after Triboar. Your dad gave you his knife, hid you in a bush, and told you to run as soon as the coast was clear." As I spoke, the girl's face drained of color and her body of fight. "Now do me a favor and stop trying to kill my friend Magda," I added. "We're not here to hurt you." Although the idea of stuffing her into a sack and not opening it until we got to Yartar _was_ mighty tempting.

Nat's chin trembled. "You spoke to my father? He's alive?"

So the demon child wasn't totally evil after all. "Yeah. My friends and I found him and the rest of your family. They're okay."

The girl's big brown eyes studied my face. "Who are you?" she demanded.

"I'm Rebecca. She's Magda. We found your caravan."

"Oh." Still dangling from Magda's grip, the girl seemed to mull over this news. "Did you kill those bandits?"

"Yeah. We did."

After another wobbly pause, the girl nodded. "Good," she said, and sniffled. "I would have killed them myself, but I didn't have a sword. Or my crossbow." She craned her neck to look up at Magda. "You can put me down, now," she added. "I won't run or try to hurt you." Magda raised her eyebrows, but set the girl down on her feet. Nat straightened her clothes, which were badly stained and a little ragged. "Where is my father now?" she asked.

"On his way to Yartar. Probably there by now. We're here to bring you to him."

Nat chewed on her lip. "No," she said.

I rocked back on my heels. "Say what?"

The little girl crossed her arms over her chest, frowning. "Father was wrong. We should never have left the city."

"You are aware that there are monsters here that are trying to kill everyone, right? I mean, this is not news to you, is it?"

"So?" Nat sniffed. "Uncle Arlen was right. He's a guardsman. He stayed to defend the city." The girl's expression went hard. "This is _our_ city. _Our_ home. We should fight for it."

Forget stuffing her into a sack. I was going to stick her in a barrel, nail it shut, and mail it to Yartar. "And by _we_ , you mean you?" I asked. "By yourself?"

Nat picked up her crossbow and hitched it on her belt. "I'm going to fight," she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder in a businesslike way. "I know how to shoot." She crossed to the south-facing window, reached behind the bed that stood beneath it, and pulled out a sword about as long as her arm. It didn't have a scabbard and its edge was a little chewed-up, but from the looks of it, someone had been trying to polish it. "And I have a sword, now. I found it on one of the dead bodies. Didn't do him any good, but I know I'll do better."

Magda snickered. "Yes. If only you had any idea how to use that pigsticker."

Nat scowled. "I do too know how to use it!"

"Hah! Fine. Let us put that to the test." Magda stepped back, grinning and spreading her arms wide. "Would you like to try me, little girl?"

Nat lifted her chin. "I would, but then you'd lose, and I don't want to embarrass you."

Magda stared back. Then she erupted in a bout of boisterous laughter. "I like this girl!" she told me. "Can we keep her?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "How did you even get into the city?" I asked Nat. "The gates are locked, and you don't look like you've been crawling through any sewers."

Nat heaved a dramatic sigh and rolled her eyes in a credible imitation of a teenager. "I _told_ you. My uncle's a guardsman." She looked at my blank, uncomprehending face and sighed again. "I know when the shifts change on the gates," she explained with exaggerated patience. "The dawn change is best, because the guards coming off shift are so tired they're almost asleep and the ones coming on haven't really woken up yet, so they wouldn't even notice if a griffon landed on their heads." She shrugged. "Plus there's not much light, so you can sneak right past them, if you know where to hide."

Magda grinned. "Magnificent. This child has a bright future as a tomb robber."

Nat glared at her. "I don't want to be a tomb robber," she growled. "I want to be a hero and save my city." Turning, she shoved open the sash. "And _you_ can't stop me."

Then, before I could do more than blink, she jumped out of the window.

Magda and I stood stock still for half a second. Then we both ran to the window in time to see the little red-haired girl finish lowering herself hand over hand down the bedsheet she'd had tied to the sash, jump the last few feet to the cobblestones, and run off down the road.

My jaw almost hit the sill. "I can't believe she just did that!" I gurgled. I turned to Magda. "And why the hell are you laughing?"

Magda pounded her fist on her thigh. "Beaten," she gasped. "Both of us. By a ten-year-old." That set off another peal of laughter. "Tempus' Balls, if I could have a daughter like that, I might reconsider motherhood."

"Suit yourself, but I think I'll pass on giving birth to literal hellspawn," I said. Irritation rose like steam. The sun was starting to set. Whatever was out there, it was making trained guardsmen defect and would probably chew a little girl like Nat up and spit her out.

For a moment, I was tempted – strongly tempted – to just let the girl go. If she wanted to get herself killed, she could get herself killed. She wasn't my kid, wasn't my responsibility, and frankly, I'd wasted enough of my time chasing after her already. She didn't want rescue? Fine. Better to cut my losses and run before this whole exercise got the rest of us killed, too.

Then the voice of my conscience, that damn screeching banshee that never let me be, spoke up. _Yeah, but she's somebody's kid, and if you let her die, I'll never let you sleep soundly again,_ it said.

I could feel the decision forming in my head even before I'd quite made it, and I kind of wanted to slap myself for it. _Fuck me. I'm such a fool._

Scowling, I grabbed Silent Partner and ran down the hall – that bedsheet might have taken the weight of a ten year old, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't hold a grown woman. Smelly took off after me, then quickly pulled ahead. "Let's go," I snarled. "We've gotta catch that demon child before she gets herself killed."

* * *

I burst out of the front door, looking up. Clouds were gathering across a darkening sky. Splotches of dark were showing up on the ground as it started to rain again. The sun was still up, but the moon had just started to rise. Night was falling.

Smelly shot out of the door behind me, his nose to the ground. He moved in a tight circle, sniffing, then barked once and took off down the road, his stride lengthening into a flat-out run and his tail waving like a banner.

I sped after him – _south, now east, now south, now west,_ said the tug of my internal compass – zigging and zagging over mud and stone through a jumble of alleys and courtyards to a broad east-west street, hoping like hell we didn't run into a blockade or patrol or worse.

Within a minute or two we were coming up – _due west_ \- on the intersection with the Way of Dragons. Feet pounded ahead. I caught a glimpse of red hair as it flashed around the corner. Smelly flashed after her, with me in third place and Mags in fourth. My breath came fast and clean and hard. My legs felt spring-loaded. Buildings flashed past me. Raindrops hit my face. I blinked them away. I ran full out, and it felt a little like flying. I found myself grinning like a madwoman. _Free at last,_ I thought. _Thank god almighty, I'm free at last._

If I ran like the wind, Shaundakul's wolf ran like a hurricane. Smelly ran with his whole body, curling and unfurling into every bound. We crossed the intersection, angling after the girl as she headed for a side street. Smelly closed on her, but at the last minute, she veered and darted between two houses. An agile twist and a flurry of claws spun him after her and into the alley. I pulled Silent Partner in and tightened my steps. Bricks and timber and plaster closed in, blurred, opened again onto a courtyard surrounded by houses….

…and the wolf's jaws snapped, closing on cloth once, tearing, then the girl spun free and he leaped and took her down.

Nat let out a scream of pure frustration as only a ten year old could do and tried to buck the wolf off, but Smelly outweighed her. Furthermore, he stood over her and caged her with four legs and gripped the back of her shirt firmly in his teeth, not unfriendly but making it damned clear this girl wasn't going anywhere on his watch.

My boots skidded to a stop. "Good job," I wheezed. I leaned forward, hands on my knees. Magda's footsteps drew up behind me. "Now-"

A clank echoed across the square.

Words dried up in my throat. My head swiveled, searching, scanning windows and doors and ground. Nothing had changed. Or had it?

Movement caught my eye, and I turned again. A hand was coming up from the street. The street? No – from a sewer grate, smack in the middle of the courtyard, only now the grate had been flipped and was sitting on the street next to the hole it used to cover.

I watched as the hand groped, searching. Faintly, I thought I heard speech – grating, deep, sounding almost like dwarven but with something dark in it that _slithered_.

I looked up. The sun was setting. I drew in a breath. "WATCH OUT!" I screamed, and yanked the air around me like a cloak.

Then, with a noise like the cracking of a mountain, the street itself erupted.

Cobbles flew, streaking dirt behind them like comets. I twisted, swinging staff and shield of air around in unison to cover me and the others, and cobbles struck my wall of wind and spun away, crashing to the ground. Shards of stone sparked and fell, making a noise like a rain of glass.

Something heaved up from the cracking ground – several somethings. I saw dark shapes swinging up onto pale scaled mounts, saw robes and strange weapons swinging and swirling, and heard a shout in a language I didn't know, but was pretty sure meant, "Get 'em!"

Still coasting more on adrenaline than brains, I reached out and slapped Smelly and Nat both on the shoulder, power screaming up in my throat. "Go!" I yelled, and poured everything I knew of speed into it. "Get her clear!" The wolf blurred, and his jaws grabbed the back of Nat's shirt and threw her towards his back. For once, the girl didn't object, but wrapped her arms around the wolf's neck and pulled herself up on his back just as he took off almost too fast to see.

A boot scraped behind me. "Gods damn it," Mags spat. "What are they?"

Short, wiry figures were filling the street in front of us. Some held wands, some held ugly spiked maces, and others were swinging themselves up onto creatures like squat, eyeless velociraptors. "Fucked if I know," I said. I was a step beyond terrified and a leap beyond pissed. This had not been a good day. I heard chanting. "Watch it!" I cried. "There's a mage." With my left hand I spun air into a smooth disc, shimmering and barely translucent and springing from the back of my wrist like some ghostly shield. I stepped in front of Magda, holding Silent Partner in my right hand and holding my left arm out in front of me just as a flurry of bright, fiery darts came shooting towards us. When they hit my shield, it flared red and the darts died as if they'd just been doused.

Mags frowned, then nodded curtly. "Thank you," she said, and stepped in front of me as the whatever-they-were started their charge.

The mage started chanting again. "Cover me, I'm gonna smoke 'em," I said. My hand darted into my potions pouch, drew out a vial of choking powder, and threw it as hard as I could. A cloud of yellow dust rose. I heard coughing and what sounded like swearing. With luck, that'd get a few of them disoriented enough to even the odds.

Now I just had to even the odds a little further.

I looked up. The sky was darkening. Rain started to fall. I could feel the wind racing. Faint spiderweb streaks of lightning lit the underside of the clouds.

I took a breath.

Then I reached out and pulled the storm in, hand over hand. Tingles started to run through me, then tremors. I clenched my jaw. My teeth rattled anyway. The rain increased, slicking my skin, my hair, running into my eyes.

Claws dug up cobbles and churned the rapidly muddying ground as the lizards and their riders charged.

I spread my feet, grounded Silent Partner, and called the storm down.

And I felt the thunder roar in my blood and bones, and I was lashed by the sudden sheet of rain like a slaver's whip, and I was blinded by the lightning, stark and white and screaming, and I found myself laughing crazily in the middle of the storm and thinking, _yes, oh, god, yes._

Lightning stabbed from sky to the ground, blasting cobblestones, lizards, and dark, squat shapes into the air. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye – lizards, circling around. I turned and raised Silent Partner. Lightning struck again. More movement, north-by-northwest. I turned. Saw more dark riders. Called. Thunder clapped and white light flashed. Purple spots clouded my vision. I heard people screaming. The sweet, pungent zing of ozone rose, together with the equally pungent but less sweet stench of burnt hair and scorched hide.

I paused to catch my breath, my chest heaving. I blinked, trying to clear the spots from my eyes. A shape loomed, coalesced – a rider, one who'd managed to fly ahead of my storm. Close up, I saw that he was a dwarf with gray skin and gray hair and he was wearing, for some reason, a pair of goggles with smoked lenses. _Hurst,_ I thought, _he looks like Nathan Hurst_ , and that was all I had time to think before he swung his flail back and drew his lizard in for a strike.

A shoulder slammed into mine, driving me to the ground. "Down!" Magda roared. Above me, I saw steel swing in a blurry arc, heard a scream, felt more than saw something go tumbling over and over past me, shrieking, while something hot and wet and steaming splattered sharply across me.

Quiet fell. My vision cleared. I realized that I was lying flat on my back, spread-eagled. Something cool, wet, and squishy was seeping through my clothes and the gaps in my armor. I was pretty sure it was mud. _And I just got these clothes washed, too,_ I thought. _Damn it._

A shape loomed over me. "Little noble?" it asked with concern. "What are you doing down there?"

I spat out a dead leaf. "Making mud angels. What does it look like I'm doing?"

Magda was grinning. "This is how you Windwalkers amuse yourselves after a battle, is it?" She made to turn. "Magda will just leave you to it, then."

" _No_ , you jerk. Help me up." Laughing, Magda reached down and grabbed my wrist. I came free of the mud with a wet, sucking sound. "Oh, ew." I wobbled, struggling for footing in the mud and broken cobblestones. The rain was thudding down in earnest, now, and my body was shaking and my head was spinning and I felt like I was coming down from a high. "Uh." I pinched the bridge my nose and tried to think. "Where's Nat?"

A light voice answered. "Here." The girl came near, her hand tangled in Smelly's ruff. Her eyes were especially big. "H-how did you do that?"

I blinked. "Do wha-" Belatedly, I actually looked around. Corpses were strewn all over the square. I counted about a dozen, most of which were blackened and smoking. "Oh. That."

The light of hero worship in the little girl's eyes was nothing I had ever wanted to see and nothing I ever wanted to see again. "You're real heroes," she breathed. "Just like the stories." She looked from me to Mags. "That's a really big sword. Could you teach me how to use a really big sword?" She turned back to me. "And you – you cast a lightning spell, and they all exploded! Boom! Pow!" The girl mimed a few punches. "Hah! That showed them!"

I winced. "I'm no hero," I said. I swallowed and pulled my eyes away from the corpse of a lizard, which was not only smoking but had somehow been blown into two pieces, neither of which were very pleasant to look at. "I'm just a-" Stone cracked. More things reached through the cracks in the road. To my horror, they looked like the legs of a spider, only they were weirdly hazy and dark mist curled off of them like steam. "What the actual _fuck_ is that?!" I screamed.

Mags held her sword low and stepped to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me. "Wraith spider," she said curtly. "Can you call more lightning?"

I raised a hand to my forehead. "Nuh…no," I said. The storm was still there, but every time I tried to grasp it, it wiggled and slipped through my fingers like cellophane noodles through chopsticks. "Sorry. I think I got a little excited and overdid it."

Mags accepted that with a curt nod. "Then do what you can."

I leaned on Silent Partner with one hand and laid the other arm over Nat's shoulders. "Damn it, kid. I thought I told you to run," I muttered.

The girl was pale. "I thought they were gone."

"Yeah, well. So did we. But they weren't." I pulled the girl to my side. _I'm a fool._ But I couldn't help it. Maybe I was the kind of person who could _think_ about leaving a kid to get eaten by spiders, but I didn't want to be the kind of person who actually _did_ it. "Stay close, kid. I'll try to keep them away from us." She swallowed and nodded, unholstering her crossbow.

Another shadowy, jointed leg groped up through the hole in the ground, then another, then another, and then their barbed tips dug into the ground and an inky body heaved itself out, trailing shadows. There was something about the darkness clinging to it which sucked at the eye as if you were staring into an endless void. Its own eyes were sunken pits, its mandibles dripped black venom, and after that I kind of stopped noticing things because a whole lot of smaller copies of the big one were spilling out into the street and I was too busy keeping myself from screaming and running away.

They came on. Magda swiped at the leading spiders. When her sword hit them, they dissolved into a dark mist, leaving no trace behind except a lingering smear of shadows.

One little spider – relatively speaking, anyway, because it was still the size of a goddamned _terrier_ \- got through Magda's guard. Without taking my arm away from Nat, I lifted Silent Partner and brought its butt down, hard. The mithril cracked through the spider's black carapace, electricity buzzed through the blackwood, and the shadowy spider almost seemed to dissolve in a flash of light.

Smelly was darting in among the spiders, just long enough to grab one at a time in his jaws and shake it and fling it aside, where it hit the pavement with a jerk and a puff of black. Next to me, Nat raised her crossbow, cranked the mechanism back, and shot, her hands almost steady despite the panicked breath whining in her throat. A terrible crunching noise and a scream from the big spider said she'd met her mark. "Nice job," I said, and she gave me a terrified rictus of a smile.

The spiders came on. Magda thinned out the little ones with her sword while I churned up a wind all around us to send them tumbling and sometimes even flying, but my head was starting to spin from the effort, which might have been why I didn't hear the chanting until a ball of silver light suddenly exploded in the spiders' midst, sending little ones bowling in all directions and making the big one skitter backwards.

I spun. Coming up on our flank was an elven woman in a blue robe and light ringmail vest, and accelerating past her was someone very tall with red hair that clashed terribly with his greenish-grey skin. He ran past us and crashed through the line of spiders, roaring like a berserker and whirling some kind of polearm with two axe heads, one on each end. Bodies flew with each swipe of that thing.

A bow sang out, pinning one of the mommy spider's legs to the dirt, where the big guy with the polearm immediately hacked it and the neighboring leg off. A red-haired woman in tight leather jogged over to us and stopped, fitting another arrow to her bowstring, "Good eve!" she said gaily, and shot a little spider point-blank. It twitched and vanished. "Might we be of assistance?"

She didn't have to ask me twice. "Nothing would make me happier," I said. I knocked another little spider out of the way before it could reach Nat. It flew, shedding sparks. There weren't many left, but I wasn't about to leave a ten year old to get eaten by spiders, no matter how annoying she was. That meant I was effectively stuck where I was, but Magda was already bounding ahead to help the newcomers against the mommy spider.

The big wraith spider reared, backing away from crazy-polearm-man's onslaught. That was a mistake. The man cracked one end of his double axe into the thing's abdomen, then stepped forward and pushed, levering one end of his polearm out just as he shoved the other in. Black ichor boiled out of the wound as the fighter wrenched his weapon out and backed away. Writhing silently, the spider came after him, its remaining legs reaching out for him, inky black barbs gathering at their tips.

Then steel flashed, and two more legs hit the ground right before the rest of the spider was cannonballed by about two hundred pounds of angry Uthgardt. "Son!" Magda shouted, and swiped off another jointed leg. "Of!" A stab opened up another hole in the spider's side and made misty black blood billow. "A!" A slash took out an eye. "Whore!" Blood sprayed across her breast plate. "Gah! This thing is not only ugly, it is disgusting!"

The red-haired half-orc, because only a half-orc could be that big _and_ that color, backed off to give Mags room to swing. "Well met," he said, and took off another leg. Magda nodded. Then the two fighters, acting on some tacit consensus, began hacking on the spider like two lumberjacks splitting a tree, one always falling back while the other lunged to strike. The spider tried to curl in on itself to protect its belly, but with most of its legs gone and weapons coming at it from each side, the effort was futile.

With a final swing and jerk and silent convulsion, the thing collapsed. Its body turned into swirls of black mist, then vanished like fog under the sun.

Leaning on her sword and breathing heavily, Magda gave the red-headed half-orc an appraising up-and-down study. "Nicely fought," she said, and stuck out a hand. "Magda, of the Thunderbeast Clan."

The look the half-orc returned was equally appraising, and his grin was slow and toothy. With his mane of red hair and magnificent sideburns, the overall effect was positively leonine. "Daelan," he rumbled, clasping her hide-clad wrist. "Of the Red Tiger. You did not fight so badly, yourself, Magda Thunderbeast."

The elven woman jogged up, holding up the hem of her robe to avoid tripping over it. Her cinnamon eyes and short, messy auburn hair and her warm smile all made her look like somebody's mom, the kind who kissed skinned knees and organized the annual camping trip and made a mean batch of cookies for the neighborhood bake sale. Nonetheless, she was still an elf, with all the grace and ageless beauty that entailed, and I was suddenly, acutely aware of the fact that I had mud in my hair, mud mired in the cracks of my armor, and mud caking my very human backside. "This way, dears," the elven woman urged me and Nat and Mags impartially, gesturing at the street behind her. "Come quickly, before reinforcements arrive."

I looked at the corpse-filled, ichor-smeared street. "You mean those weren't the reinforcements?" I asked, dismayed. "Nine Hells." Under my hand, Nat's shoulder was trembling. When I looked at her face, it was so white that her freckles stood out like ink splatters. The kid looked downright shellshocked. For a second, I forgot to be angry at her. "You good to walk, kiddo?"

The elven woman saw it, too. She held out a hand, smiling. Nat, after a moment's hesitation, took it. "My name is Linu," the elf said. "And I am very pleased to make the acquaintance of one so brave. Had I seen such a battle at your age, I think I might have fainted."

"Yes, and the gods only know what might have happened then," the red-headed woman said wrily. She nocked her bow and started walking, her eyes combing the street. "Let's go. I feel exposed here, and not in a pleasant way."

It was comforting to be surrounded by friendly weapons again. The elf, woman and half-orc led us around the corner and down another street. I squelched after them to a sprawling building that looked like it had been built in stages – the central portion of the ground floor was built in stone, while smoke rose from a brick addition to one side and the floors above were timber frame and plaster. Light spilled out of the huge, diamond-paned leaded glass window that looked over the street. Figures moved inside, so many that I thought there were more people in this one building than I'd seen all day in the rest of the city.

There was a sign hanging on black iron chains from a pole just outside the door. Unlike most inns and taverns, it didn't have a painting to go with its name, just the name in plain black letters: _The Yawning Portal._

The red-headed woman rapped the backs of her knuckles on the door. A few seconds later, a slot in the door slid back. A pair of red-brown, bloodshot eyes glared out. "Who's there?"

"'Tis I, Sharwyn. Let us in."

The suspicious glare coming through the door didn't let up. "Yeah? How do I know you really her and not some doppa…dipple…copy?"

Sharwyn's eyes narrowed and nostrils flared. She drew herself up. Daelan put a hand on her shoulder. "Steady," he murmured. He raised his voice. "Linu and I are here as well, Grayban," he said. "We are no doppelgangers, I promise you."

Sharwyn put her hands on her hips. "We most certainly are not," she said. Briefly, she looked over her shoulder at me. "And with us is the Heroine of Undrentide, unless I miss my mark – and I never miss my mark," she added, her voice arch. "So let us in, or you can explain to Durnan why you have left a worthy adventurer standing on his doorstep."

A new voice cut in. "Oy, shove over!" A face popped into view, and by then it came as no surprise to see a narrow halfling face and a head of curly red hair. Apparently, Waterdeep had volunteered to host this year's annual ginger convention, because between Nat and Linu and Sharwyn and Daelan and now this guy, I was practically drowning in redheads. "Hah! Thought I knew that voice. Welcome back. Did you find 'em? I see that you did. What're you on about, Grayban? Let 'em in!" The halfling's face vanished, although I could still hear him yelling. "Tamsil! They're back! Pour something stiff, why don't you? No, I don't care what, long as it peels paint!"

Grayban's eyes returned to the slot. From the color of his skin, he was a half-orc, and it looked like he upheld their reputation for stupidity as much as Xanos thumbed his nose at it. "All right," he said. With a thunk, a clink, and a creak, the door swung open. "You come in. But no funny business."

Sharwyn patted Grayban's cheek as she stepped past him, the gesture just a little too caressing to be innocent and yet a little too negligent to mean anything at all. "I would not dream of engaging in any funny business, dear Grayban," she said. "Nor droll business, nor jocular, nor diverting, nor in fact any enjoyable business at all. I cherish dullness, I assure you." Then she got over the threshold, clapped her hands, and struck an attention-getting pose. "Your attention, please!" she said, in a voice that wouldn't have been out of place on a theatre stage. "I am pleased to present to you the siren of Shaundakul, the nemesis of Heurodis, the lightning lady – the one, the only, the Heroine of Undrentide!"

I found myself giving some serious thought to the prospect of shoving Nat inside and running off into the night, but I didn't really want to get eaten by spiders or worse. Next to me, Mags was laughing, because of course she was.

There was nothing for it. From the looks of it, this inn was currently Waterdeep's epicenter of the heavily armed and therefore likely to be the safest place in the whole forsaken city - and night was falling.

I stepped forward, into warmth and light and a room full of people. It was like stepping in front of a podium, and that was when old reflexes kicked in and dropped a smiling mask over my face, showing nothing, saying nothing, giving away nothing.

Zigana had been right. Old habits died hard.

Silence fell. Leather creaked and weapons clinked as one person after another turned to look. Whispers started up and then they started to spread.

As if on cue, a glob of mud finally worked its way out from under one of my scales and hit the floor with a _splat_. "Hi," I said to the staring crowd. "Did I hear somebody say something about a drink?


	13. The Yawning Portal

_A/N: Many thanks, again, to my betas, and: Welcome to the beginning of HotU, everybody. Please buckle up and keep your arms and legs inside the story at all times._

* * *

 _Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next._

\- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Chapter 13: The Yawning Portal  
~*~

Tamsil put her hand over the pile of armor and clothes and my utility belt, a frown creasing her forehead. "I'll do the best I can, of course," said the innkeeper's daughter. "But we're on water rations due to the refugees, and the laundress fled town, so I…well, I'll have it all cleaned and polished and back to you as soon as I can, that's all I can say."

I sighed. "Good enough," I said, tugging my sleeves down. Mhaere, the innkeeper's wife, had lent me some of her clothes to wear while her daughter tried to get all of the mud out of mine, and while Mhaere had looked about as tall as me she obviously wasn't quite as gangling. To add insult to injury, her blouse was noticeably loose around my chest. It figured that with all the running I'd been doing over the past couple years, somehow I hadn't lost that little bit of extra padding around the hips, which I could probably afford to lose, but I _had_ lost plenty in the boob region, which had been poverty-stricken to start with. "Anything else?"

Tamsil flushed. "Er," she said. "Possibly."

I caught her look and gave her a level stare in exchange. "What is it?"

The girl's flush deepened. I wasn't sure what I'd done to make her stammer, but stammer she did. "T-there is a man outside."

"Okay," I said. I yanked a sleeve down. Once again, it rose inexorably towards my elbow. I gave up and started rolling the cuff. "Good for him. What does he want?"

"He-" Tamsil cleared her throat. "He would like to know if the Heroine of Undrentide would be willing to sign his buttocks."

From where she lounged in the room's lone armchair, Magda erupted into hoots of laughter.

I wasn't laughing. "Oh for fuck's sake," I growled. "Is he good-looking, at least?" Her face pink, the girl shook her head. "Then the answer's no."

Tamsil bobbed a quick bow. "I will let him know your answer," she said. "In the meantime, dinner will be ready in a candlemark or so, if you've the appetite for it."

If anyone else bowed, scraped, nodded, saluted, or even just plain stared at me, I was going to start throwing things at them. "I'll be right down," I said.

Tamsil left, leaving me alone with Mags. "What a shameful waste of fame," my friend teased. "You have men throwing themselves at you for a chance that they might brag of having tumbled a famous heroine, and what do you do? You bloody _dodge_."

I rolled my eyes. "You want 'em, you take 'em."

"Perhaps I shall," Mags retorted good-naturedly. "You are far too picky. If a man is not pretty and pointy-eared and prone to writing bad poetry, you will not touch him."

"Oh, come on. That's not true, and you know it."

"Yes. You are right. He does not have to be pointy-eared, and he does not need to be a poet, he merely needs to brood like one."

"Yeah, well, at least the men I sleep with can't braid their ear hair."

Magda's eyes brightened. "Speaking of which, did you get a good look at that half-orc?" She smiled dreamily. "Is he not magnificent? Like some great, maned beast." Her smile turned wicked. "I wonder if his teeth are as sharp as they look."

"I don't." Rough could be fun sometimes, to a point, but I drew the line at anything that required me to keep a healing potion close at hand.

She sniffed. "Suit yourself. Will you at least speak to him for me? You must make certain that he knows what a potent warrior I am. An Uthgardt warrior does not boast of her accomplishments to other Uthgardt. It is unseemly. A true warrior leaves it to the skalds to sing her praises. You must act as my skald."

"You sure you want me to do that, Mags? I mean, you _have_ heard me sing, right?"

The Uthgardt flapped her hand at me dismissively. "You need not actually sing, little noble. Magda is aware of your limitations. Pretty words will be sufficient."

I sighed. "All right. What do you want me to say?"

Magda frowned and toyed with her braid. "Tell him how many bandits I have killed. Oh! And tell him that I once slew a gnoll chieftain one-on-one. That should impress him." She bit her lower lip. "Perhaps you might suggest that we arm wrestle, as a demonstration of strength?"

"I'll tell him all about how wonderful you are," I promised. "I bet he'll be so impressed, he'll be letting you tie ribbons in his chest hair before sundown."

Mags grinned. "Excellent," she said. She stood, flipping her braid over her shoulder. "Now, I believe I heard a rumor that the bathhouse was free. I will go make myself beautiful."

I replied without thinking. "You're already beautiful, Mags."

My friend's grin widened. A pleased flush mantled her cheeks. "Hah! Sometimes, little noble, you are not _entirely_ tactless."

"You're welcome."

Mags left. The door clicked shut behind her.

I went to the window and thrust open the casements. It was only a dormer window, but it let in the fresh air – at least, it would have, if the air hadn't smelled of smoke.

My elbows rested on the narrow sill. The crowded rooftops of Waterdeep marched under my eyes, with Piergeiron's Palace and the Blackstaff's tower rising above it all. Mount Waterdeep reared against a fading sky, Selune hanging pale at its peak. Griffons wheeled in the sky, white wings outspread to catch the very last of the light.

Waterdeep's skyline wasn't the skyline of my old hometown. Nothing was. But it had its own beauty, even now, when the city was fighting for its life.

I sighed. "What do I do, Shaundakul?" I murmured. "I've got a kid to rescue who doesn't want to be rescued, and a city in shambles."

As soon as I spoke, something about the feel of the air in the room shifted, as if somebody had just walked in, but to all appearances, I was still alone.

Then a wind rose up above Waterdeep's rooftops. It hit the curtains and plastered them against my face, temporarily turning the world yellow with blue flowers.

I batted fabric away from my face. "You're kind of an asshole," I said, when I could speak again. "You know that, don't you?"

The wind danced playfully around me and chuckled in my ears.

I smiled in spite of myself. Shaundakul was kind of an asshole. That was okay. I was kind of an asshole, myself. I'd just known some very good people, and they'd taught me how to act good, though I didn't think there was any force in the world that could make me actually _be_ good. Genuinely good people did good things naturally. I had to think about it.

I curled my arm around Silent Partner and rested my cheek against it, thinking. "She's ten," I mused. "She might be pretty badass for a ten-year-old, but I don't think she quite gets what she's getting into." I hadn't known shit when I was ten. I hadn't known shit when I was twenty. Hell – I was just on the shady side of thirty, now, and I still didn't know shit. The only difference was that back then, I hadn't known shit but I'd thought I knew everything, whereas now, I didn't know shit but I _knew_ I didn't know shit.

The problem was, I couldn't force Nat to do anything. For one, given her track record, we'd have to tie her hand and foot and drug her just to get her out of here, and even then there was no guarantee that she wouldn't be able to sneak away the instant our backs were turned. Plus, if we came across anyone else on the road, all Nat had to do was scream, and then we were going to find ourselves trying to explain what we were doing carting around a hogtied ten-year-old. For another… "It's her life," I muttered. "I can't make her decisions for her." Free will was the last bastion of…of everything, really. Without it, we were nothing, all of us. Even ten-year-olds. I had to believe that. If I didn't believe in free will, there was no point in believing in anything, because there was no choice to the believing.

And with free will came the right to make mistakes, even awful ones. I'd made my share. My best teachers – and my god – had stepped back and let me make them. They all seemed to feel that screwing up was the best way to learn. I didn't really mind. They were right, and in hindsight, I was grateful. They'd respected me enough to let me make my own decisions. Shaundakul still did. I just hoped that his continued presence in my life meant that I wasn't screwing up _too_ badly.

I leaned on the windowsill and looked out on the open sky, watching, rapt, as the stars came out and the wind made them wink as the clouds blew across them. The stars in this world were a wonder. With so much wilderness and its cities so few and so small, the night sky of this world was painted with stars – bright stars, dim stars, patches of brightness and great swirling streaks of light that described the spiral arm of some mysterious galaxy.

As I often did, I wondered whether my home world was out there, on that distant galactic arm – a tiny blue world orbiting a yellow sun, not very much unlike this one. Were we even in the Milky Way? Or had I walked through that portal and into another galaxy entirely, living in some part of the universe so distant that the light of my own sun didn't even reach this place? I didn't know. I didn't think I ever would.

That thought certainly put things in perspective, though.

Nat was making a mistake. Of that, I was as certain as I could reasonably be. Between the Lords and its army and a lot of powerful civilians who'd made the city their home, Waterdeep was a force to be reckoned with. If it was flailing, then whatever was after it was bad with a capital 'B' and a whole lot of exclamation points. Nat had gumption, but she was young and unskilled and had no business fighting her city's war, as much as she wanted to. I had more power than her, thanks to Shaundakul, and _I_ had no business fighting this war.

But I'd made a promise. Or I hadn't, not really, not with my tongue - but in my heart, I had. I'd let Belorin think his daughter would be back with him soon, safe and sound. The problem was that keeping Nat safe and respecting her right to make her own mistakes seemed mutually exclusive. Which one did I choose?

The wind murmured in my ear. If I listened closely, it almost sounded like a far-off voice, saying words that tickled the very edges of my understanding.

My forehead furrowed. "You think I should talk to her?"

The wind made the curtains dance.

Frowning in thought, I watched the shadows lengthen and pool in the street below as the sun sank towards the horizon.

 _Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way,_ I thought eventually. _Maybe it's not just a choice between forcing her to leave or letting her get herself killed._ "You think I can make her see reason?" I asked.

The wind swirled around me briskly.

I grimaced. "It's not that easy, you know." The kid was hell-bent on having things her way. Getting her to change her mind would…well, it'd be kind of like getting me to change my mind when I was her age, actually. I thought back, trying to remember. How had dad dealt with me when I got like this? Well, mostly he'd just let me have what I wanted. I loved my dad and I knew he'd loved me, but now I kind of wondered whether he'd felt guilty over mom's death and about spending so much time at work, and whether his guilt was why he'd never been able to say 'no' to me.

Maybe, in hindsight, dad should have said 'no' to me more often. Maybe I wouldn't have turned out to be quite so much of an entitled nightmare. But that was useless to think about – it was done, dad was dead, that part of my life was over, and the best thing I could do now was to focus on the present.

Shaundakul, though…he was different from dad. He talked. Mostly, he asked questions. Dumb ones, seemingly, up until I had to answer them and found out that I couldn't, or at least I couldn't without revealing myself to be an idiot who hadn't actually thought things through at all.

Shaundakul never forced me to do anything. He just forced me to think about what I was doing, and if I refused to think, he let me stumble around and fall on my face and then he stooped over me and politely asked me to please explain to him why I was now lying face-down in a mud puddle. Somehow, being obliged to actually explain my own stupidity always had the effect that a million direct orders to stop being a dingbat wouldn't have.

I sighed. "You're right, damn you," I said. "I have to talk to her." I couldn't push Nat. If she felt like she was being pushed, she'd just push back harder. That's how spoiled, wilful brats like us _worked_.

But maybe, if I took the pressure off of her, she'd stop fighting me, and then I could lead her around to actually _thinking_.

I pushed myself away from the windowsill. "Good talk, old man," I said, turning to go. I paused. "Oh, and thanks for Smelly. He's been a life saver. Literally."

A little zephyr brushed my hair back from my face and kissed my cheek.

Then the wind faded, and the feeling that there was someone else standing in the room faded with it.

I found Nat in the innkeepers' quarters, in what, from the girlish décor and the single narrow bed, must have been Tamsil's room.

Nat was sitting on a braided rag-rug, rolling a ball across the floor for Smelly to catch. The wolf was lying by the hearth. He watched the ball go by with mild interest. Then he yawned and put his chin on his paws.

As I walked in, Nat glared at the wolf and retrieved her ball. The glare sharpened when she saw me. She wasn't hostile, exactly, but she wasn't warm and cuddly, either. "What do _you_ want?" she asked sullenly.

 _Tough crowd_ , I thought. I leaned against the door, hovering on the threshold. "To talk," I answered. "Can I come in?"

The girl looked at the wolf. He looked back calmly. That seemed to reassure her. "I guess so," she said grudgingly. Then she shot me a wary frown. "You're not going to try to talk me into leaving again, is it?"

I crossed the threshold and joined Nat on the floor. "Nah," I said. "I just want to get out of here and I can't leave until I know whether you're staying or going." I took out my little paper packet of candies and popped one in my mouth. Then I held the packet out to Nat. "Cloudberry candy?"

Nat frowned at me. Then she shrugged, helped herself to a few candies, and put them all in her mouth. "I don't know what I'll be doing," she mumbled, a little indistinctly. "I haven't decided yet."

I contemplated holding her head in a bucket until she miraculously reached a decision. Then I forced the thought out of my head. "All right. What would you rather do?"

Her answer came immediately. "Stay here."

I decided to steal a page from Shaundakul's playbook. "Why?" I asked, as if I was only mildly curious.

"You know why. It's my city. I should defend it."

"Says who?"

That stumped her. "You know," she said, and gestured vaguely. "Everyone."

"Oh? So you think everyone's so smart?"

A reluctant snicker escaped her. "No."

I wondered if parents felt so blind when they had to talk to their kids about stuff like this. I knew that I felt like I was groping my way through a hedge maze, blindfolded – and not a nice hedge maze, either. One with thorns and roots to trip me up and rabid topiary lions to eat me if I strayed from the path. "You could stay here," I said. "But if you do, you're pretty likely to die. You saw what's out there. You saw what we had to fight."

Nat swallowed. "Yes."

"You know what dying means?" I asked. "It means you don't get to grow up to be any kind of hero. It means I or somebody else has to go to your dad and tell him you're dead. It means your dad has to see your corpse, say, 'That's my daughter.', put it in a coffin, say goodbye to it, and bury it." I remembered my mother and my father, being lowered into the ground – one image foggy through the lens of childhood, and the other seen through adult eyes and agonizingly clear. "And that's if he can even find a body to bury. It means-"

Nat jerked upright. "I know what it means!" she cried. "I've seen people die. You think I haven't?"

I looked at her, remembering. My family hadn't let me say goodbye to my mom because they didn't want me to see her die. I thought a part of me had hated them for it ever since, even my dad. I'd been young, but I'd had the right to see and understand. She was my mother, and I'd been young, not stupid. "All right. I'm sorry for talking down to you."

Nat blinked at me, then subsided. "Oh," she said. "Well. Good."

I tried a different tack. "Mind if I ask you a question?" Nat shrugged without looking at me, which I took as permission. "Can you fight what's out there?"

The girl flinched. "No."

At least she'd learned that much. Oh, how late we came to wisdom, and how thoroughly pissed off we were by the time we got there. "So why stay?"

The kid shrugged. "I don't know," she mumbled.

I stared at her. "You don't know?" My voice rose incredulously. I struggled to ratchet it back down. "Seriously? _That's_ your answer?"

Nat stared down at the floor. Her frown and the forward hunch of her shoulders were sullen. She shrugged again, silently, and played with some loose threads in the rag rug.

On second thought, maybe I _should_ just wrap her head to toe in bindvine and throw her over the back of a horse. Had I been this bad when I was her age? I couldn't have been this bad. I wouldn't have made it to adulthood if I'd been this bad. "Okay. Let's break it down. What would you do if you stayed?"

That, at least, got an immediate answer. "Fight."

"Good. How?" I started to rattle off questions, feeling peculiarly like Drogan. Was this how he'd felt, when he was teaching me? Had I ever been this clueless? "How do you fight duergar? Spiders? Drow? What do you do in an ambush? If you're surrounded? How do you create a distraction? Disable a spellcaster? Counter a spell if you can't stop them from casting? What if the spider bites you? Do you have an antitoxin, and do you have it somewhere where you can get your hands on it in about five seconds? How do you deal with arrows? Do you have a shield? A spell? Do you find cover? How do you fight from cover? When do you go in for close combat? When do you keep your distance? What's different about fighting somebody with a sword compared to a mace, or to a polearm, or to a couple of really sharp daggers?" I looked at Nat's beleaguered expression, my own temper close to fraying. "Should I go on?"

Nat scowled even more deeply. "Fine. You're so smart. Why don't you tell me the answers?"

"Because it took me three years to learn to even think about all that stuff and I still don't know the answers half the time, that's why."

Nat hunched a little further into herself. "So what if I leave? What am I supposed to do?"

I decided to steal another page from Shaundakul's playbook. "I don't know. What do _you_ think you could do?"

Nat looked about as annoyed as I usually felt when Shaundakul pulled that kind of question on me. "I…I don't know." She looked at my face, and something she saw there must have clued her in on the fact that saying _I don't know_ one more time wasn't going to end well for her. "Go to Yartar, I guess. If I can." She looked at me. "Can I? I mean, with those monsters out there…can I even get out of the city again?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. We all got in. If we leave during the daylight, we've probably got a chance to get out. After that, well, you saw. It's not safe on the road, but it's not as bad as Waterdeep."

Nat gnawed on her lower lip. "And if I stay?"

"Well, everyone tells me the situation's been getting worse every day, so in all likelihood it'll just keep getting worse." As far as I was concerned, optimism was for people who weren't paying attention. "If we're lucky, Durnan's brave heroes will figure out what's happening and put a stop to it before the city gets destroyed."

Nat stared at me. "And if they don't?"

"If they don't, the city gets destroyed, these things overrun the coast, and we get to look forward to widespread war and possible total societal collapse," I answered. I grinned, a little maniacally. "But hey, the good news is that housing prices in Waterdeep will drop like a rock - assuming anyone's still alive to buy a house."

The little girl seemed to deflate. Her face went red, and her chin quivered. "This isn't fair. This is my home. I want to fight. I want to be a hero, like all of you."

"Yeah," I said. "I know you do. You damn near shot an Uthgardt, you wanted to be a hero so bad."

The girl's breath heaved in a watery, startled laugh. She was quiet for a long time, except for the sniffling. Her eyes seemed glued to her hands. "How can I be a hero if I leave?"

I shrugged. "You can still help out."

"How?"

"There are other Waterdhavians out there, running. They'll need a place to stay. Food. Jobs." A thought occurred to me, seeded by a memory of Tarn's words. "Hell, you seem like a fast rider – you could run messages for people. There'll be plenty of need of that before this is over. Things are gonna be messy for a while, and people need to know what's happening the next town over."

Nat made a face. "That's not very heroic."

"There are a lot of different ways to be a hero."

"No, there aren't. That's just what grown-ups say when they don't want you to do something fun."

"Dying's not fun, kid." I grimaced. "Trust me on this one."

Nat frowned at me thoughtfully. "They say you're a hero."

Not this again. "I'm not."

The girl kept going. "They say you defeated a medusa," she said. "She was a great wizard, and you beat her."

"Not by myself." Also, I was pretty sure the bitch had taken me down with her and I still didn't know how I'd gotten out from under the ruins of Undrentide alive, but that was something I tried not to think about too much. "If I'd been alone, we wouldn't be having this conversation, 'cause I'd be dead."

If stubbornness was a qualifying trait for heroism, then Nat was going to save the whole damn universe someday. "They say you brought down a mythal," she insisted. "They say you saved the world."

I scowled. "They say a lot of things," I said. Frowning, I scratched the palm of my left hand. "Don't try to make me into something I'm not, kid. I'm a terrible role model." Hell, my diet alone was something no one should ever emulate – it was better now, in a world without take-out, but it still featured sugar and alcohol more prominently than it featured actual food. At that thought, I reached into my packet and pulled out another piece of candy. "Besides, I didn't set out to save the world. If I did, it was only by accident."

Nat frowned. "How do you save the world by accident?"

I sighed. "Long story. You had to have been there. Mostly, stuff just happened and I reacted to it and somehow it worked out okay in the end, although I still don't know how."

Nat frowned. "That's not very heroic."

"Yeah, well. It's the truth. Sorry."

Nat stared at me for a long time. "What will you do, if I stay?" she asked suddenly.

I shrugged. "Stay here."

Nat blinked. "Why?"

I felt one corner of my mouth curl up. "Because I'll hate myself if I leave." It was the truth. I knew I wasn't a good person. If I did good things, it wasn't out of some natural wellspring of goodness in my heart. If I did good things, it was because I couldn't deal with the guilt-trip my conscience would send me on if I didn't.

Aaaand I'd gone and made Nat cry again. I seemed to have a knack for that. "That's not fair, either," she wailed. "What happens to me if you die? How'll I get home then?"

I'd almost felt sorry for her, too. My frayed temper snapped. "If I die defending you from duergar, kid, you're gonna have bigger worries, 'cause I'll come back and I will haunt the _shit_ out of you until you're sorry."

Nat stared at me. Then, suddenly, she started to giggle. "Hah! That's funny."

I stared back. Then I sighed. "I'm so glad I could entertain you."

Silence fell. Nat couldn't seem to decide whether to giggle or sniffle.

Eventually, I decided to break the silence. "Well, you don't have to decide anything now. Even if you wanted to leave, we can't go anywhere until the sun rises."

Nat wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt. "I guess not."

I stood, and held out a hand. "You eat dinner yet?" I asked. Nat shook her head. "All right. Let's go. I'm hungry." And after a day like this one, I really needed a drink.

* * *

The common room of the Yawning Portal was packed with people. Many of them looked like refugees, but several of them were armed, and a few were obviously adventurers. I'd developed a knack for recognizing them – just look for anyone wearing outlandish clothes and obviously not right in the head and bam! Adventurer.

I saw a pretty blonde elf sitting in the corner talking quietly to the gigantic hawk on her shoulder, a tall man in a cloak of constantly shifting colors speaking to a bald woman in the simple robes of a monk, a scarred dwarf enthusiastically eating a slice of cheese off of his battleaxe, and a few others besides.

Nat's head turned, taking it all in, her eyes owlishly wide. This probably wasn't the most appropriate place for a ten-year-old, but with all the weapons in this room it was probably the safest place in Waterdeep right now, and anyway I was sure it would be an interesting learning experience for her, although I didn't want to be in the room when she demonstrated some of her new vocabulary for her dad. Adventurers could be a little colorful sometimes.

I scanned the crowd. Daelan was easy to find, being the tallest person in the room. I'd thought Xanos blocked out the sun, but this guy was just as tall and twice as broad. He also exuded tranquility, which was something Xanos only did under heavy sedation.

I spied Magda's blonde head at a table on the other side of the room and sent Nat over to join her. Then I made my way over to Daelan. "Fancy meeting you here," I said with a breezy smile. "Mind if we chat?"

A bemused smile played at the corners of Daelan's gray lips. "Not at all," he said. He studied me. "I must say, you look much improved from before."

I saw my opening and went for it. "If you think I clean up nicely, you should see my friend Magda," I said, and slipped an arm through his, effectively anchoring him down. "She fought well today, don't you think?"

Daelan blinked. A purple flush started to creep up his cheeks, or at least what I could see of his cheeks through his long, flowing sideburns. "I…yes, of course. She was very, er. Very impressive."

"You don't know the half of it." Magda was seated at the long table near the fireplace, along with the rest of our rescue party. When she saw me chatting up Daelan, she sat up and flashed me a meaningful look. I nodded and then, putting on my best nonchalant face, I guided Daelan across the room, taking the most circuitous route that I could and walking very slowly while I told him all about Magda Thunderbeast.

We reached the table. "…and she's smart, too," I finished, finally letting Daelan go. "Did you know she can burp the entire elven alphabet? Not many people can do that."

The blush had crept all the way up to Daelan's eyebrows. His tranquility was looking a little rattled. He did, however, keep sneaking glances at Magda, so he couldn't have been that scared. "Of that," he said. "I have no doubt."

I slid onto the bench next to Magda. She'd shed her breastplate and done something to her blouse and between her and Sharwyn there were enough headlights shining at our table to rival the light of the sun. Smiling blandly at everyone else, I slipped a key into Magda's hand underneath the table. "Evening, all," I said.

Sharwyn was hiding a smile in her wine glass as she looked from Daelan to Magda. "Good eve, and well met," she said to me. "It is good to see that you have found a change of clothes. Mud is never a flattering fashion choice."

"Oh, I don't know about that," I said airily, putting on my best debutante voice. "I hear the swamp troll look will be _all_ the rage this season." Sharwyn laughed. The kitchen door swung, and I saw Tamsil trotting over with a carafe and some more glasses and plates. "I don't think I officially thanked you for helping us out," I added in a more normal tone of voice, pulling apart a chunk of brown bread and slathering it with butter. "So, thanks. How'd you know to find us?"

Sharwyn was the first one to answer. "We saw the lightning," she explained. "Linu felt that the storm was of divine origin. Logically, no drow priestess or duergar cleric could ever command a power so tied to the open sky, which left us to conclude that the lightning had been summoned by an embattled surfacer. So we went to offer aid, and good that we did – though I for one did not expect to find quite so famous a figure." She took a sip of her wine and studied me speculatively over the brim of her glass. "Have you come to lend aid to Waterdeep? Durnan has not yet opened the well to Undermountain – I believe he is expecting one or two late arrivals - but I am sure he would be glad to add you to the roster of willing adventurers."

I popped a piece of bread in my mouth. "No."

Sharwyn blinked. "No?"

"No. I came to find her." I nodded at Nat.

The whole table turned to look at the girl, who flushed at the attention. "I…ran away," she said. "My family left Waterdeep, but I wanted to come back."

"Her father is one of the refugees who left Waterdeep," I elaborated. "We found their caravan and rescued them, but Nat here had escaped during the attack. Her father didn't know where she'd gone. Poor guy practically begged us to find her and make sure she was safe. I drew the short straw and tracked her here."

"Yes," Magda added, laughing. She leaned over, looking at Daelan through her eyelashes. Tectonic shifts happened around her neckline. "And a merry chase she led us on, too – right into the waiting arms of the duergar."

Daelan's eyes flickered down, then jerked back up. "You, ah….you seemed up to the challenge," he managed, his voice faint. "I must admit."

Magda smirked. "Oh, Magda knows how to handle a sword." Her words were mild, but her eyes and her tone could have blown the doors off of a convent. "Perhaps later she shall show you some of her special techniques." Her smirked widened. "If you feel… _up_ to the challenge."

The half-orc's cheeks turned a slightly darker shade of purple. "I, ah…" He cleared his throat and reached, a little blindly, for his goblet. "I…thank you." He tugged at his collar, as if trying to let off a little steam. "I find your offer…strangely intriguing."

Magda rested her chin on her hand and smiled at him. "Oh, excellent."

I elbowed her. If she kept on the way she was going, Daelan was going to lift the table by a few inches without the use of his hands, and I didn't want to have to explain that particular phenomenon to Nat. "Save it for later, you two," I muttered in my friend's ear. Magda looked at me, smiling, but at least she shut up.

Sharwyn was grinning at Nat. "I, for one, am impressed," she said to Nat. "You evaded an Uthgardt warrior and the Heroine of Undrentide herself, and you gave those spiders the what-for. I think you'll make a fine adventurer, one day."

Nat flushed bright red, all the way from her neck to the roots of her hair. "Truly?" she breathed.

"Yes," Sharwyn said. Though that day is not today. Today, Waterdeep is dangerous for a trained adventurer, and deadly to the untrained." She looked at Nat's crestfallen face, and reached over to lay a hand on the girl's shoulder. Her jewelry clinked. "Never fear. I heard that the Adventuring Academy in Neverwinter has recently re-opened and is looking for new students. I might even be able to put in a good word for you."

Nat brightened. "Really? I mean, it is? You would?" Then her face fell. "But I don't have the money. I'd have to ask my father."

Sharwyn's red lips curved in a charming smile. "Then you will just have to ask him," she said. "And the sooner, the better. The Academy is costly. You will need to start saving your coppers."

I was hastily revising my opinion of Sharwyn. With her impeccable grooming, carefully chosen necklaces nestled just so in her cleavage, skin-tight leather, and that studied air of effortless charm, she presented the very image of your typical bard - vain, shallow, sensual, and just a little self-absorbed. No one could be that self-absorbed and that perceptive at the same time, though, which made me wonder exactly how much of what I was seeing was the real Sharwyn and how much was an elaborate act.

The red-haired halfling from earlier was eyeing me over a half-empty glass of ale. "How'd you get into the city, if the guards weren't expecting you?" he asked. "I just barely made it ahead of the cutoff, m'self."

I grimaced. "Through the sewers."

He laughed. "The smugglers' passage, eh? Well done. I might've availed myself of those tunnels a time or two, I'm not ashamed to admit."

I believed him. He had a smile so crooked he could probably walk through a corkscrew sideways, an appraising stare that made me want to check to see whether my price tags were showing, and there was something hiding in the back of his eyes that didn't quite make it all the way out into the light. "I don't think we've been introduced," I said. "And you are?"

He saluted me with his beer. "Tomi Undergallows. Grin, to those who know me, though those're few and far between. I must say, I'm surprised you've never heard of me." His grin was slightly self-mocking. "I've a reputation as something of a rogue and a bloody rapscallion."

His accent rang a bell. "You ever live in Calimport?" I asked. "I have a friend from there. You have a little of the same accent."

He gave me a sharp look. "Why, yes. Though I left in a bit of o' rush. Long story. It involved a lady, and I'm not one to kiss and tell, y'see." An odd smile flitted across his face, and he leaned forward, his chin in his hands. "And you?" he asked, his eyes sharp. "You know, I've quite an ear for accents, m'self, but I can't place yours. Where d'you hail from?"

Mags laughed. "Let it go, little man. Nobles and city folk will have their secrets, and that is one she refuses to share, even with me."

I put on my press secretary's smile, perfectly polite and perfectly blank. "I've moved around a lot."

"That so?" The halfling looked at me for just a few seconds longer than was comfortable, then laughed and sat back. "Well, I've moved around a bit myself, since Calimport. Always on the run, y'see, for one reason or another. When I heard the coffers of Waterdeep were offering a hundred thousand gold to anyone who could solve their little Undermountain problem, I decided to try m'hand at heroism for a change."

Daelen raised his eyebrows. "Word has it that you are no stranger to heroism. Didn't you-" A thump came from under the table. His expression went pained. Sharwyn's expression hadn't changed, but I could have sworn I'd seen her shift slightly in her seat. "Never mind," he said lamely. "I, ah, forgot what I was about to say."

Linu glanced at the others and cleared her throat. "Regardless, we are glad that you could make it," she said to me. "Though I am saddened to hear that you do not intend to stay. Waterdeep is sorely pressed. The city could use more people like you."

 _Like me?_ I thought. _Lady, you don't even know me._ "It looks like it's got plenty of people like me," was what I said instead. Among this bunch, I was nothing special. "One more won't make a difference."

I was spared further argument by the arrival of Mhaere, the innkeeper's wife and a tall blonde woman with short, grey-streaked blonde hair and a stately bearing. She approached with a platter of grilled and cured meats, oven-fried potatoes, and pickled vegetables. "I apologize for the selection," she said, setting the platter down. "At this time of year I would normally be able to offer fresh vegetables and a nice suckling lamb, at the very least, but with the quarantine and all of the extra mouths to feed-"

Linu waved Mhaere's apologies away. "It looks delicious," she said. "I, for one-" Her sleeve caught the edge of her glass and knocked it over, sending firewine all over the table. "Oh! Oh, dear. I do apologize…"

While the others mopped up the spill, I looked towards the kitchen door, where a certain amount of screaming seemed to be happening. It sounded like the chef was a little temperamental. "Everything all right in there?" I asked.

Mhaere glanced towards the door and sighed. "Oh, nothing," she said. "Chef can become a little overwrought at times. It seems that his biscuits have been vanishing. Stolen, he claims, though by whom I really have no idea." She cleared our old drinks away, replaced them with new ones, and piled the empties on another tray to take them away. "Now, if you will excuse me, I think I should go calm him down before he threatens to give notice. Again."

Magda looked at Nat. "That was not you, stealing the biscuits, was it?"

Nat shook her head. "No," she said candidly. She slipped a slice of grilled bacon under the table before helping herself to a drumstick. Beneath the table, something went _gnormf._ The bacon didn't resurface. "Not this time."

Dinner went on pretty late, occupied in pleasant conversation and several rounds of drinks. Around midnight, I sent Nat off to bed and Smelly off with her. The girl grumbled a little, probably wanting to stay up with the adults and listen to the grown-ups tell more off-color stories, but she'd developed an even stronger fascination with the wolf than with the adventurers, and when Smelly nudged her towards the stairs she went off without too much more protest. I supposed that having a real wolf for a pet, even though he wasn't actually a pet and was only around temporarily besides, beat having a plain old dog any day of the week. Smelly, for his part, seemed to have adopted her as a kind of honorary cub, and put up with her prodding and clinging and chatter with paternal patience.

Eventually, the night wound down. Magda and Daelan had vanished at some point, as had Tomi, leaving me with Linu and Sharwyn. Linu had her chin in her hand and was running her finger around the rim of her wine glass, and Sharwyn was helping me finish a bottle of dragon's breath. "So, what's the scoop on Tomi?" I asked, a little too drunk to be circumspect. "Daelan was about to say something about some prior heroism. Then you stopped him."

Sharwyn and Linu exchanged glances. Sharwyn was the first to turn to me, but she still hesitated before speaking, as if choosing her words with care. "The Undergallows traveled with the Hero of Neverwinter. When she sought to defeat Morag."

Linu nodded, sadly and slightly tipsily. "It was widely considered to be a strange pairing," she elaborated. She shifted, accidentally planting her elbow in the wine puddle. "She was a paladin of Arvoreen and quite a noble soul, by all accounts, and he is, ah…"

"A scoundrel of the first order and an unrepentant flirt," Sharwyn finished, laughing. She tipped some more brandy into my glass, then into hers, before setting the bottle down with a decisive clink. "However, it seemed that they were able to find common ground. Rumor has it that they grew quite close."

"So why's he so sensitive about the subject?" I asked. "They break up?"

Sharwyn frowned, swirling her brandy glass between two long fingers, graceful in her gestures even though she was almost definitely three sheets to the wind. "There are many rumors, often contradictory," she said. "But what I know is this. I know that the Hero and Lady Aribeth were friends, and after Lady Aribeth fell, the Hero was never the same. I also know that she had a falling out with Lord Nasher over Aribeth's execution, and not long after, she vanished from Neverwinter, though not before Lord Nasher ordered that her name be struck from the records of the plague and all that followed." The bard shrugged. "After that…I do not know what happened to her. All I know for certain is that, at some point, she and Tomi Undergallows parted ways, for she vanished and he did not. And I know that it is best not to speak her name where he can hear."

"Or to mention Neverwinter. Or Aribeth. Or the plague." Linu sighed. "I fear that there is great pain in Tomi, buried deep. Too deep. He is not the same person he was before the plague. I have tried to draw him out, but the Undergallows is far too skilled at evasion."

I remembered the darkness in the back of Tomi's eyes, and, with the benefit of the hindsight, wondered if it hadn't looked a lot like grief. "Is the hero still alive?" I asked.

Sharwyn hesitated, and shrugged. "No one knows," she said.

 _No one but Tomi,_ I thought. I stared into my glass. Then, with a sigh, I drained it and stood. "It's late," I said. "It's been fun, but I should really head to bed."

Linu tried to rise, stepped on the hem of her robe, almost cursed, recovered, and stood. "Before you go, I would like a word with you." Her eyes went to Sharwyn. "In private."

I felt my eyebrows lift. "All right," I said, and let her draw me to one side. "What is it?"

Linu took a deep breath. "I have seen you before."

I blinked. "Where?"

"In my dreams."

This was either about to get mystical or was the lamest pick-up line I'd ever heard in my life. Mentally, I marked the nearest exit. "I see."

Linu held up her hand. "Hear me out," she said. "My goddess seldom speaks to me directly, but reveals her wishes in dreams and visions. Last eve, she showed me your face."

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stir, trying to rise. " _My_ face?"

"Yes." Linu pursed her lips. "At least – I believe it was yours. It would not stay the same. Sometimes it was in light. Sometimes in shadow. Sometimes it did not even appear human, but like the face of…of some sort of bird." She frowned and waved a hand dismissively. "But that is besides the point. The point is that I saw you sometimes in shadow, and sometimes in moonlight, and when you were not in the moonlight-" She hesitated.

The pause stretched out. "Yeah?" I prompted.

Linu drew in a steadying breath. "You died," she blurted. "Over and over." Her cinnamon eyes blinked rapidly. "Then I saw you in the street today, and I knew my dream must be more than a dream - and though I do not know you well, my dear, I would not wish what I saw on any soul."

Almost in spite of myself, I reached out and clasped her shoulder. "It's all right." Then the absurdity of the situation struck me. Why was I comforting her when I was the one who'd apparently done all the dying? "What else did you see?"

She shook her head. "Nothing else," she admitted. "And even now I am not certain of the meaning of what I saw. Was what I saw the death of the body, or the spirit? Or was it merely a, a _changing_ – a death and rebirth, if you will." The cleric sighed. "Sehanine shows us the truth, but I am afraid it is up to us to interpret it."

 _Well, thank you for that much, old man,_ I thought. _You might be a little cryptic sometimes, but at least you actually talk to me. With words._ "So what's your interpretation?" I asked.

Linu's fingers plucked at her robes in a refreshingly un-elven display of nerves. "I think…I think you should not stray too far from the moonlight, Rebecca," she said. "I think your life may depend on it."

I stared back. Then, sighing, I rubbed my forehead. "Great," I muttered. "Just what I needed. More gods in my life." At Linu's hangdog look, I squeezed her shoulder. "Thanks for the warning," I told her. I didn't really buy this vision stuff, but after this long in Faerun, I knew better than to discount it completely. "And let me know if you have any more visions."

The elf smiled at me. "I will do so." She turned, swaying slightly. "And now," she added with the careful enunciation of the more-than-tipsy. "I think I shall go to bed, for that firewine had quite a kick." She'd only had one glass – well, two, counting the one she'd knocked over – but I supposed elven livers worked a little differently than mine.

Saying my goodnights, I climbed the stairs to the attic room I was supposed to be sharing with Magda, since the inn was so full even floor space was at a premium.

As I went down the hall, a door banged shut and the lock turned with a click. Probably a guest who wanted some extra privacy, although the rest of the floor would have been happier if he'd shut the door more quietly.

When I got to the room, Magda was nowhere in sight. The room was stuffy, so I crossed to the window and opened it a crack to let in some air. Then I stripped to my underwear, set Silent Partner in easy reach of the bed, and slipped under the coverlet. My holy symbol slid over my skin, and so did the other necklace I wore underneath it, a delicate golden chain with a little musical note charm that had belonged to my mother. I'd bought it for her before she died. Aside from a few tattered memories, it was all I had left of her. Of my dad, I had nothing but memories, but at least I had a lot more of those.

I lay awake and stared at the ceiling for a while. The bed was too soft, my hand was itching again for no apparent reason, and I couldn't see the sky. Somewhere, someone laughed raucously. Somewhere else, a glass broke.

After a while, I squirmed onto my side, facing the room's single window. The moonlight was streaming in, bright and white. Some stars were just visible over the rooftops.

Later, as I dozed, the door creaked open. I cracked an eyelid and turned my head. Magda's silhouette was outlined, briefly, in the light from the hallway. I noticed she wasn't wearing much in the way of clothes.

My friend snuck to where I had my pack, or tried to. I listened to her rummage around for a minute before I spoke. "Left outer pocket," I slurred sleepily. "By the candy. Blue vials."

Mags stooped a little closer to the floor. I heard the rustle of cloth, then a clink. Her outline straightened. "Thank you, little noble," she said. "Go back to sleep. I am sorry I woke you."

"You didn't. And you're welcome." I rolled over. "Have fun. Tell Daelan I said hi."

After she had gone away, I watched the moonlight move across the floor.

Then I threw the blankets back, got up, and dragged the bed towards the window until the moonlight fell across it fully.

That done, I went back to bed and slowly, finally fell asleep.

I dreamed.


	14. Dream

_I need you so that I could die_  
 _I love you so and that is why_  
 _Whenever I want you, all I have to do is_  
 _Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream_  
 _Drea-ea-ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream_

\- Everly Brothers, "All I Have To Do Is Dream"

 _Oh, no, I see  
A spider web, and it's me in the middle._

\- Coldplay, "Trouble"

~*~  
Chapter 14: Dream  
~*~

In my dreams, I stood in a dark, cool place and watched.

Figures moved below me, before me. They were dark, too, and there were no candles or lanterns or any other sources of light that I could find. Somehow, though, I could still see, although there was no color to anything and everything was in shades of grey.

In the center of the hall stood an elven woman. Her hair was white and her skin was black, but it wasn't black in a manner of speaking, it was _black,_ like coal.

"Show me," the elf woman said. Her voice was calm, but I could hear the razor in it, and I could see her tapping her coiled whip against her thigh. _Tap-tap,_ it went. _Tap-tap,_ and it played out the staccato beat of a temper close to coming apart.

A man bowed. He wore flowing robes with uneven hems that made him look vaguely like a butterfly. His expression, insofar as I could read any expression on his dark face, was tense. "As you command, Valsharess," he said, and rattled off a series of strange syllables.

In the middle of the pillars, the air shimmered. Then it coalesced into an image, still but static-y, like a transmission over an old TV with a broken antenna.

Abruptly, I found myself staring at…myself?

I peered closer, curious. I'd never really seen myself from this angle. I knew I wasn't eighteen anymore, but from here it was painfully apparent. The last of my baby fat had melted away from my cheekbones and left me with a jawline that could cut glass. Also, my hair looked like someone had ripped the tape out of about fifty audio cassettes and dropped it on my head, and why hadn't anyone ever told me my nose looked like that from the side?

The woman circled my image. "This?" she demanded. "This is the one you say I should fear? A surfacer female?" She twisted and lashed out. The elf's hands went to his throat, clawing at the whip suddenly wrapped around it. His eyes bulged. "Fool!" the woman raged. She wrenched the whip free. It was barbed, and took a lot of her victim's throat with it. He collapsed, gurgling. She turned away before he finished falling. "What is known about this female?" Her arm rose, pointing like a javelin. "You! Speak!"

Another man stepped forward, wearing identical robes to the previous man. His hands were clasped together very tightly. "She is a priestess," he said. He kept his eyes on the ground as he spoke. I saw the skin around his eyes twitch with the effort of not looking at his former colleague, who'd fallen face down in a pool of blood and was no longer moving. "She follows a lesser surface god, an ancient power of the air, now greatly diminished. Rumor suggests that this female is among the ranks of her god's favored souls, but reports about her abilities are conflicting. Our spies suggest that she is little more than a base vagabond, possessed of no particular martial or magical prowess, social status, or intelligence. However…" He paused.

 _Tap-tap_ went the bloody whip. "However?" the woman echoed, the razor in her voice close to bared. "Do not waste my time, male. Speak."

The man didn't lift his eyes from the ground. "It has also been reported that she defeated one of the lich Belpheron's apprentices, a medusa of some power, and was involved in the destruction of an ancient Netherese mythal. Therefore, we must conclude that she possesses power of a nature and to an extent which is not immediately apparent."

"Is that so?" The woman studied my image for a few moments longer. Then she turned her back on it, her lip curling in disgust. "My sources are reliable. They tell me that this female is a threat. She must be pretending to be less than she is in order to lure her enemies into complacence. You will divine her true nature, or you will be punished. Is that clear?"

The man bowed deeply to her back, and stayed bowed. "We will find you the truth, Valsharess," he said to the floor.

The woman studied her fingernails. "Excellent. As of now you will assume your former master's position. Find me everything there is to know about this female, and you may consider this elevation your reward for your service to me." Her eyes flickered to the corpse on the floor. "I trust you know what your reward will be for failure."

"We will not fail you, Valsharess," the man said. He backed away several steps before coming out of his bow, then backed the rest of the way out of the room.

The woman never turned to watch him go. "Clean that thing up," she said to no one in particular. A few men scurried forward and started carrying the corpse away. "And summon my Red Sisters." More people scurried off.

Somehow, I'd come to be in front of the woman. I studied her, still in that detached state of unconcerned curiosity. She reminded me of Heurodis. Her face was prettier, but the arrogance was the same. The fear, though – that was different. Anger and pride and ambition were carved in every rigid line of this woman, but trembling underneath them was a fear so big and dark and desperate it kept bleeding through the cracks.

I didn't know what she was so afraid of. Maybe it was the fashion police – her taste in clothes was awful. I hovered in front of the woman. "Hi," I said. "Madonna called. She wants her bra back."

Then, abruptly, I felt a yank, as if a hand had just grabbed the back of my non-existent shirt and picked me up by it.

I was drawn up and away, and suddenly I was standing in a forest glade with someone's hand clapped firmly over my mouth. "Rebecca," Shaundakul's voice whispered in exasperation. "Much as I cherish you, I sometimes wish that you would speak less and think more."

"She couldn't see me," I said, or tried to. With Shaundakul's hand over my mouth, it came out more like, "Shcdnfme."

Shaundakul's long-suffering sigh stirred my hair. "How remarkable."

"Mmf?"

"I am a god, and yet you, my dear, nearly drive me to prayer. How do you do it?" I felt him take his hand away and turn me around by the shoulders. The expression on his wolfish, grizzled face finally cut through my dreamy haze. He looked anxious. Why did Shaundakul look anxious? He was a god. Gods didn't get anxious, they just made us mortals anxious. "Please, Rebecca, have a care." With one hand, he reached over his shoulder and touched the hilt of his huge, black-bladed greatsword, as if for reassurance. "There are forces at play which are not clear to me, but which I believe cannot be taken so lightly as you seem inclined."

I swallowed, suddenly feeling very cold and very, very stupid. "What's going on?"

He hesitated before answering, then shook his head. "I do not know," he admitted with an unusual and blood-curdling frankness. "There are some places where the surface winds do not blow, and my sight cannot reach." His hands squeezed my shoulders, as if to emphasis his words. "That was no normal dream, daughter mine. Something touched you, and it was not me." Anger darkened his eyes. "I believe that I have managed to pull you away from it and hide you in my shadow, but please, do me a kindness and do not light any bonfires to advertise your presence."

I smiled up at him. In spite of everything, it was good to see him again. Warmth kindled in my chest. "Aw. Worried about little old me?"

The anger in his eyes eased. Melancholy affection turned them the pale grey of a winter sky. "When Myth Drannor fell, most of my children were torn away from me in a single day," he told me. "A thousand thousand souls, and I felt each death like my own. It nearly was." Immortal though he was, with that grief haunting his face he just looked _old._ With a gentle hand, he brushed my hair from my face and tucked a few strands of it behind my ear. "I have drunk too deeply of loss, my little falcon. I would not like to lose you again. Any of you."

My smile faded and my heart twisted. "I'm sorry."

Shaundakul smiled gently. "Do not be," he said. "Some would say that I am less than I was. I say that I am more. My children may be fewer these days, but now I cherish each and every one of you as I never did before."

Getting smiled at by a god was like a nice, hot bath for the soul. I felt better already. "That's a lot of cherishing," I murmured. Then I grinned. "Especially with Bazkas. I think he's gained weight."

My god chuckled. "I have a vast heart," he said drily. "Vast enough to contain even my stalwart little wolverine." He took his hands away from my shoulders. "Regardless, I-" He stopped in mid-sentence. His head whipped around like a cat who'd just heard a noise and wasn't sure if it was a mouse or a dog. His eyes went wide. Abruptly, he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, picked me up, and _threw_ me. "GO!" he thundered. "Wake, _now_!"

My eyes snapped open. A shadow was standing above me, red-eyed. Moonlight flashed on an upraised blade, suddenly shining silver-white and so bright it hurt. The figure holding the knife cried out. The weapon thudded to the floor.

Panic and reflex took the reins from my brain, which seemed to be several steps behind events. A breeze was coming in through the window. I grabbed it and shoved it at the figure as hard as I could. An almighty gust whipped through the room. The curtains went horizontal, the bedsheets plastered themselves against the ceiling, the room's lone chair crashed into the wall, and the dark figure flew backwards out of the window.

There was a crash of breaking glass, a sharp scream, and an abrupt thud.

My brain started to catch up. I threw aside the covers and ran to the window. The glass was almost gone except for a few jagged pieces around the edge of the frame. I leaned out carefully and looked down.

There was a body lying in the street beneath my window. Something black was spreading out from under it and snaking over the cobbles.

Numbly, I backed away. The backs of my knees hit the bed. I sat down heavily. My hands were shaking. I stared at them. The moonlight turned them white as ghosts. Automatically, I groped for Silent Partner, like seeking the comfort of an old friend's hand.

Shouts and running footsteps and a familiar howl from the hallway stopped my hand in mid-reach. The door shook under the impact of a heavy body, once, twice, before collapsing. Smelly landed on the wreckage of wood and shook himself. His eye fell on me, and he exhaled sharply. Then he bounded over, jumped onto the bed, snuffled me frantically, jumped off of the bed, snuffled the floor, and then jumped back on the bed and snuffled me some more. The fur all along his spine was standing up so straight he almost looked like a porcupine, and he was still growling in fits and starts.

Magda burst in, Stormsplinter in her hands and a bathrobe flapping around her knees. She paused when she saw me, took in the scene, and raced over. She yanked something down from the window and wrapped me in it. "Cover yourself. Half the inn will be here soon," she ordered. Her calloused hand went under my chin, tilting my face up so she could see it in the light. "Are you hurt? What happened?"

Wordlessly, I pointed at the window. Mags let me go and went to look. My voice didn't seem to be working. Thoughts chased one another in my head. I'd been fast asleep. That knife had been so close. If I'd woken up a fraction of a second later…if Shaundakul hadn't sensed something was wrong and shoved me out of the dream when he had …if the moonlight hadn't hit the knife just right and startled my would-be killer into dropping it…the litany of _if_ played through my head, and each _if_ led to a very bad place.

Shivering, I drew cloth around me with unsteady hands. Then I looked down at it, blinking. It was yellow. There were blue flowers on it, and little blue tassels. Given all available evidence, I could only conclude that I was wearing a curtain. Why was I wearing a curtain?

Footsteps rushed in while my brain played catch-up. Tamsil was in the lead, with more people coming up in the hall behind her. "Is everything all ri…" She looked at me, and Mags, and the broken window, and the dagger on the floor. "Oh. Oh, dear." Her hands twisted together. "Not another assassin, I hope?"

Magda turned slowly, like a bull moose who was trying to decide whether to charge. "What do you mean, 'another'?" she asked.

Tamsil opened her mouth to answer, but whatever she'd been about to say vanished in a squeak and a stumble as a slight, robed figure almost barreled into her. "I do beg your pardon," Linu said breathlessly. "Doors make for quite treacherous footing, don't they? No wonder so few people try to walk on them." She scanned the room. Her eyes settled on me, and her face went even paler. She rushed forward, dropping to her knees beside me. "By the gods! What has happened? Are you hurt?"

Seeing other people freaking out somehow settled my own nerves. Maybe it was just a case of misery loving company. "I'm fine, Linu," I said, trying to fend off the cleric's hands. "Really."

A light step scraped the floor. Tomi picked his way over the shattered door, studying me with a cheeky smirk. "I must say, m'lady, that's a lovely curtain you're wearing," he remarked.

His joking tone seemed to jog my brain back into gear. I flipped the edge of the curtain over my shoulder like a toga. "Thanks," I drawled. "I saw it in the window and just _had_ to have it."

Tomi grinned. "Ha! From crackin' apart to crackin' wise in less time than it takes to boil an egg. Well done, Lady Blumenthal."

"I'm no lady," I retorted. I intercepted a slender elven hand on its way to my forehead. "I'm fine, Linu. Really. Thanks. You can stop now. I'm serious."

Tomi lifted his eyebrows. "Not a lady? Oh-ho! I beg to differ," he said. He looked me up and down. "You might dress like a vagrant, drink like a fish and curse like a sailor, but the way you carry yourself makes that curtain look like a bloody ballgown, and that temper of yours says you've a long habit of havin' your own way."

The little ginger was too perceptive for his own good. I stared at him coldly.

Tomi's grin widened. "Don't look down your nose at me, blue-blood," he said. "You know you're only provin' me right."

A hand spun me around before I could come with a reply, probably sparing me further embarrassment. "Rebecca," Magda said urgently. "Where is your weapon?"

"Silent Partner?" I turned, reaching for it. "It's right…" The place where I'd leaned the quarterstaff before sleeping was empty. I stared at it. The empty space stared back at me like an accusation. I turned away from it, combing every inch of the room with increasingly desperate eyes. The floor. Under the bed. More empty spaces were all I saw. "I…I left it right there…what…who…"

Tamsil cleared her throat uneasily. "That was what I was about to say," she said. "There have been several assassinations recently, here in Waterdeep. Of high-ranking officials, mostly. No one knows who is responsible because they have not yet been caught, but the poisons used have been of drow make and each time it has happened, they, um…" She looked at my face, winced, and looked away. "The assassins. They, um, stole the target's possessions, including their weapons," she finished haltingly. "Each time. To render the victim helpless. Or so people say, though no one knows where they take the weapons, after."

Mags was looking at my face. "Out," she said. She pointed at the door. "All of you. Out. Now." Vaguely, I heard rustling, footsteps, murmurs, saw Magda kneel in front of me. I seemed to be sitting on the bed. When had that happened? Gentle, rough hands took both of mine. "Rebecca," my friend said. "Rebecca, sweetling, look at me."

I lifted my eyes. "Where is it?" I asked wildly. Suddenly, I was on my feet. My hands flipped over the already overturned chair, shoved the bed to the side to run frantically over the floorboards beneath it. "Where did it go?" I went to the window, looking for the familiar mithril glint in the street, thinking maybe it had fallen even though it would have taken some doing to get a seven foot quarterstaff through a three foot window. It wasn't there. My eyes fell on the quilt, piled on the floor. I strode over and threw it to the side. Nothing. Nothing but empty space. I stopped moving as suddenly as I'd started, and stood in the middle of the room, trembling, afraid to move in case all of those empty spaces swallowed me up. "They can't take it," I said. I heard my own voice, and it didn't sound like mine. It sounded lost. "They _can't_. I promised him I'd take care of it." I'd made the promise on Harry's grave, the grave of my first friend in this world, maybe my first real friend ever, killed by a mix of dumb accident and pointless malice and my own damned stupidity. "I promised."

Arms enfolded me. "I know," Mags said. "I am sorry."

I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw tight. _Big girls don't cry._ "I promised," I managed to say, and then I couldn't keep it back any more. A sob tore out of me, then another, and another, until I was clinging to Magda and crying like I hadn't cried in years.

My friend stroked my hair. "Ssh. I know," she said, while in her arms I wept like a broken-hearted child. "I know."


	15. Help

_A/N: In which Rebecca learns that hell is not, in fact, other people – and that she's not quite as alone as she thinks she is._

* * *

 _When I was younger, so much younger than today  
I never needed anybody's help in any way  
But now these days are gone I'm not so self-assured  
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors_

 _Help me if you can, I'm feeling down  
And I do appreciate you being 'round  
Help me get my feet back on the ground  
Won't you please, please help me?_

\- Beatles, "Help"

~*~  
Chapter 15: Help  
~*~

The mood in the common room of the Yawning Portal was subdued. Most of the clientele was still asleep, and the rest had made themselves scarce. Maybe they were afraid assassination attempts were contagious.

"I apologize," Durnan said. He brooded in front of the fireplace, one burly arm resting on the mantel. "To think that such a thing could happen in my own inn, and to one of my own customers – it is unthinkable."

Magda was sitting next to me on the sofa, one arm around my shoulders. "Never mind that," she said. "Focus on what is important. Those scum stole her weapon. Where would they have taken it?"

"My weapon isn't all they got," I said. It was the worst thing, but not the only thing. "They got my pack." All of my potions. My herbs. My spare clothes. My map – gods, my map. Mom's jewelry, save for her necklace. The engraved silver flask Drogan and Lodar and Farghan and all my other friends in Hilltop had all pitched in on for my birthday. I felt tears rising again and had to swallow them back before I went on. "The only thing they didn't get was the armor and the change of clothes Tamsil was cleaning." That, and the little piece of polished fluorspar Kelavir had given me before we'd parted ways again. It had stayed in my pocket through two washings, so I supposed it was even more polished now. I turned it over in my fingers as I sat there, staring at all of its pretty colors and wishing I was anywhere but where I was.

Next to me, a solid oak quarterstaff was propped against the wall – supposedly a good weapon and lightly enchanted, although I honestly couldn't tell. I didn't touch it. It felt wrong to hold a weapon that wasn't Silent Partner, like cheating on a lover or lying to a friend.

Durnan spread his hands. "No one has been able to discover where the drow take their victims' belongings. Everyone else they have targeted is dead, and their belongings never resurfaced."

"Not even on the market in Skullport?" Tomi asked. He was sprawled in a leather armchair, demonstrating a catlike ability to take up spaces at least two times his size.

"Not as far as I have heard," Durnan answered. "Though it may be too soon."

"Aye." The halfling flipped and caught his knife, an idle gesture he didn't even seem aware of. It was a weird knife, as short as a dagger but with an almost boomerang curve to it. "It might be a few months 'til the goods cool enough for someone to snatch 'em up."

Mhaere spoke up from her seat by the fire. "Regardless, our supplies are at your disposal, Rebecca. We cannot replace what was lost, but at least we can make certain you do not leave unprepared for whatever you face."

"But why Rebecca?" Daelan's voice came from behind me. Behind Mags, actually – he was standing behind her with his hands braced on the sofa's back, close to touching her shoulders. "The drow have been assassinating high-ranking Waterdhavian officials. Nobles. People of rank and power within the city." He held a hand out to me. "With no disrespect meant to Rebecca, she holds no official rank or power here. Why attack her?"

Nobody had an answer for that. I looked up to find Linu looking at me. She said nothing, but her face was troubled. I looked away again. My eyes fell on Sharwyn, seated next to her. "You said you'd take a look at the body," I addressed Sharwyn. "Did you find any clues?"

Sharwyn cleared her throat. "The drow's armor was somewhat distinctive – red leather, heavily enchanted," she said. "Her dagger was dipped in poison, and we found a poison capsule in her mouth. It had been bitten through. She was most likely dead before she even hit the ground. This appears to have been a do-or-die mission. That is not a surprise. Drow do not tolerate failure. "

Durnan grunted. "As to how she got in, she must have climbed and gone in through your window - or just bloody teleported in. I have guards on duty at the well and all the outer doors at all times."

I'd left the window open. Stupid of me, but I hadn't exactly been expecting someone to climb through it and try to kill me. Still, the idea that she'd come in through the window was slightly less terrifying than the idea that there was someone out there who wanted me dead so badly that they were teleporting drow assassins straight into my bedroom.

The voice of the woman from my dream echoed in my head. _Send for my Red Sisters,_ she'd said. The assassin had been wearing red. I shuddered. Magda's arm tightened around my shoulders, and Smelly shoved his head under my hand, whining. "Do you think they were after me?" I asked. "Or was it just a crime of opportunity?"

Sharwyn hesitated for a second before answering, her voice diplomatic. "It would be somewhat odd for a drow assassin to come all this way and risk her true mission just to indulge in a bit of indiscriminate murder."

"So you're saying she was here for a bit of _discriminate_ murder. Nice." None of this made any sense, but hey, if I was a target, why not make myself a moving one? "If I leave Waterdeep," I said then. "Will whoever it is still be able to find me?"

Sharwyn hesitated again. "It is possible," she said. "I do not know how they were able to target you specifically – at the very least, they must know what you look like, if not have some sort of physical spell focus with a connection to you, like a lock of hair or a drop of blood - but if they were able to do it once, they may be able to do it again."

"Well, that's just fan-fucking-tastic." That was it. I was never going to sleep again.

"I have a simpler solution," Mags said.

I looked at her. "What?"

"Find out who wants you dead. Kill them. Take your weapon back. Piss on their corpse. End of the problem."

"Sure, Mags, I'll get right on that. How hard it could be? There are only, what, a million drow? And they're black and they live in the dark so it'll be like trying to find a polar bear in snow, only with more bleeding."

Mags shrugged. "I did not say it would be easy, just that it would be simple."

 _Only an Uthgardt would say something like that,_ I thought. I pinched the bridge of my nose. _Okay. One problem at a time,_ I told myself. _First, the not-immediately-life-threatening one: Nat._ "No matter who's after me or why, it's probably not safe to be around me right now," I said. I didn't know if I'd be able to save myself if another assassin came after me, much less save anyone else who was with me at the time. Hell, if she hadn't been busy riding the Red Tiger last night, Mags would have been bunking with me. It was just possible that the only thing standing between me and the loss of another friend had been about eight inches of half-orc. "So," I said, pulling myself away from my musing. "If I've just become a walking death magnet, what do I do about Nat?"

"I'm right here, you know." The girl was sitting on the carpet next to Smelly. Her tone was a little waspish, but her freckled face was solemn. "You don't have to talk over my head."

"I wouldn't have to if it wasn't so far down." I looked at her. "Okay. Fine. What do you think we should do?"

The girl was quiet for a minute. "I…think I should leave," she said, and looked down at her feet. She played with the laces of her boots, avoiding my eyes. "I wanted to fight, but I don't think I can. I mean, I _could_. I'm not afraid to." She looked around as if daring anyone to comment on her bravery. "But I don't think I'd win, and Sharwyn says it's stupid to get into a fight you can't win." There was a brightness in the kid's eyes and an idolizing tone in her voice when she said Sharwyn's name that she definitely didn't have with me.

Tomi laughed. "I'll agree to that."

"Me too," I said. At least one thing had gone right. The apparently concerted effort of multiple adventurers had finally convinced Nat that while adventuring was fine if you had some clue what you were doing, untrained kids had no business fighting legions of nasties from the underground. "If you go, though, you can't go alone. And don't give me that look. I know you were fine on the way down, but at the very least you need someone to get you out of the city in one piece."

Linu cleared her throat. "I may be able to help with that," she said. She smoothed the front of her robes and stood, frowning in thought. "But first...might I have a word, Rebecca? In private?"

I was starting to dread those words, coming from her. "All right," I said, and stood. "Let's go find somewhere quiet."

The others fell to talking amongst themselves, planning things I really didn't know much about, while Linu and I headed down the hall. As we neared a junction with another hallway, I heard running footsteps and the slam of a door. When I looked, the other hallway was empty. _If I didn't know better, I'd think somebody here was trying to avoid me,_ I thought. Not that it really mattered. Right then, I was more worried about whoever was trying to _find_ me.

I hustled Linu into another side room, this one empty except for a cat which hopped up onto the sofa right next to me as I sat. The cat, a plain orange tabby, rubbed all along my arm before flopping down on its side, rumbling like a tiny thunderstorm. Linu eyed the cat and sat on a chair on the other side of the room. I eyed her. "Are you all right?" I asked.

"No," the cleric replied. She took a deep breath. "No, I am not all right."

"That makes two of us," I said. That got a faint, sympathetic smile. "More visions of me dying?"

Linu waved a hand. "Oh. No, no, nothing like that."

"Oh. Good."

"Yes." Linu smiled brightly. "This time, it was me."

I blinked. "Oh. So, uh. Not good, then."

"It was certainly not what I would call a pleasant way to pass the night."

Gods save us both from the gods. "What did you see?"

The other cleric drew in a steadying breath. "Many things, but they all began at the same point. I dreamed that I descended into Undermountain, and I died there in a series of increasingly unpleasant and sometimes embarrassing ways." She glanced at the cat and shuddered. "Once, I was torn apart by tigers."

"This is your goddess being helpful?"

"Well, yes, of course. Forewarned is forearmed, after all. Doesn't Shaundakul send signs and portents to you in your dreams?"

"No. He shows up in person and offers unsolicited advice."

Linu blinked. "Ah. Well, to each their own." She rubbed her eyes. There were bruised-looking circles beneath them. "I did see you, however," she added. "I meant to mention that. But you did not die this time."

My voice was bone dry. "That's a relief."

"Wait until you hear what I saw before you say that. I dreamed of you in snow, casting a shadow which was not yours. As I watched, you were drawn further and further into this shadow, until at last you switched places." Linu clasped her hands nervously. I got the impression that it was to keep them from shaking. "Your shadow became you, you became the shadow, and you were left trapped in the snow while your shadow walked away and swallowed a sea of lights."

This was why I hated prophecy and visions. They were always so obscure that you had no idea what they meant until whatever they'd predicted was actually happening, at which point they became about as useful as a chocolate teakettle. "That's…vague."

The elf stood and crossed the room to me. "Perhaps, perhaps not," she said. "May I see your left hand?"

I raised my eyebrows but held my hand out to her. She took it, gently turning it over so that it faced palm-up. A frown marred her smooth forehead. "Nothing," she murmured. "Strange. When you and the shadow were joined, it seemed that you were joined at this hand. Or perhaps through it. The vision was somewhat unclear."

I stared at my hand. There was a small white scar in the center of my palm. Memory stirred. "There was a place," I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from far away. "In…in Undrentide."

Linu's warm cinnamon eyes were on my face. "Tell me," she urged.

A shudder ran down my spine. All of my memories of Undrentide were wrapped in shadow, except for Heurodis. That one blazed in pain. "Deekin found some old shrine," I said slowly. Flashes of memory came – lurching through shadowy streets, the trembling weight of Xanos leaning hard against me, and then a call from Deekin and the sensation of ducking through a door into a cool, dark place. "We needed a place to rest. Xanos was…not feeling so good." I'd finally found out what it took to shatter the sorcerer's nerves – losing Drogan, then getting turned into stone and back. "Inside, there was…some kind of an altar with this shriveled-up black thing on it."

Linu's hands held mine. "What happened?"

I shook my head, frowning. "I'm…not sure," I said. I remembered that there had been a feeling in that place – a darkness choked with rage and pride and viciousness and a thousand awful things. I should have walked away, but couldn't. I remembered being drawn to it, the way someone might be drawn to a train wreck, or maybe it was more like the feeling of standing on a precipice and feeling that crazy urge, just for an instant, to find out what it would be like to just step over the edge. "I think I touched it, and a splinter came off in my hand." I remembered pain as something sharp tried to worm its way under my skin. "I got it out, though. I'm sure I did."

Frowning, Linu touched the mark on my palm. "All of it?"

My fingers curled in. "Yeah," I said. I could remember pulling the splinter out, remember it hitting the floor. Remembered turning away and leaving that place. "All of it."

The elf let me go. "Sehanine let it be so," she murmured. Then she sighed. "Regardless, one thing appears certain."

I took my hand back slowly. "What's that?"

"You have a part to play in all of this." Linu sat next to me and the now-sleeping cat, her face earnest. "Think of it. The assassination attempt. My visions. Whatever is happening here in Waterdeep, it appears to involve you."

A hollow pit was forming in my stomach. I found myself leaning over, elbows on my knees, suddenly breathless and dizzy. My hands came up to cover my face. They were shaking. I didn't believe in visions or in fate, and yet it was happening again, just like Undrentide. Events were sucking me into their orbit, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I lowered my hands, licked dry lips, tried to speak, failed, and tried again. "I had a dream," I said hoarsely. "Last night."

Linu looked at my face. Then, gently, she took one of my hands in both of hers. "Will you tell me?"

I didn't want to. I didn't even want to think about it. What I wanted was for this to not be happening. _But it is,_ I thought, my heart sinking. _It's happening, and I don't want to have to deal with it alone. I can't._

I took a deep breath. Then I started talking – about the arrogant elf woman of my dream, and the conjured image of myself, and her Red Sisters and her bloody whip.

When I was done, Linu was staring at me. "Well," she said at last. "That confirms it. Whatever is happening here in Waterdeep, you appear to be connected to it."

I stared back. Then I groaned and buried my face in my hands again. "I can't believe it. Why does this keep happening to me?"

"Fate, perhaps?"

A laugh burst out of me. It was a little wild. "To hell with fate." I'd fought too hard to be free to live my life as I chose to accept that my so-called freedom was just a sick joke, and none of my choices really mattered. "I don't believe in fate."

"Very well," Linu replied reasonably. "If not fate, would you accept extremely poor luck?"

My next laugh was shaky. "Yeah. That, I'll take."

Linu rested a hand briefly on my shoulder. "I think I may be able to lift some of this burden from your shoulders, at least," she said. At my confused look, she gave me a gentle smile. "Allow me to escort your young charge out of the city. That way, you need not worry about endangering her or failing to fulfill your duty to return her safely to her father."

I blinked at her dumbly. "What about you? You came to Waterdeep to help the city, not play babysitter."

She shrugged one slim shoulder. "I have come to believe that in helping you, I am helping the city." Then she grimaced slightly. "And Sehanine has made it clear that it would be unwise for me to venture into Undermountain. It may be that she requires my death, but I feel that her vision was a warning, not an instruction. Thus, I must find some other way to be of assistance."

I realized that my mouth was hanging open. "Oh. That would be…pretty amazing, actually. Thank you."

Linu's smile widened. "It is always my pleasure to help any who need it."And in this case it is also my duty, I think, or else why would Sehanine tell me of you?" Then she patted my shoulder and stood. "Besides, the reputation of your order precedes you. Our kind may more often invoke Lady Luck, but luck runs out, and when it does, it is the Helping Hand who pulls us back from the edge of the Abyss. Many adventurers here in the North are alive today only because a Windwalker flew to their aid. I think it is time to return the favor. I know the others feel the same."

Yet again, Shaundakul had pulled my bacon out of the fire just by hanging his symbol around my neck. "Thanks, Linu. I owe you, big time."

She smiled. "It was nothing," she said, and patted my shoulder on her way to the door. "Now, I must make preparations, and quickly-" She opened the door, and something tumbled in with a shriek and a thud. "Oh!" Her automatic step back got her heel tangled in the hem of her robe, and she lost her balance and fell backwards, landing with a loud _oof!_

The crumpled shape in the doorway looked up at me, cringed, and then tried a tentative grin. A scaly muzzle pulled back from rows of pointy little teeth. Beady eyes gleamed nervously. "Um," the creature said. "Hi?"

I stared. Then I lunged, hands outstretched hungrily, one word on my lips.

" _You_!"


	16. Undertow

_A/N: Everybody say, "Hi, Deekin." Hi, Deekin!_

* * *

 _Old friends,  
Sat on their park bench  
Like bookends.  
A newspaper blown through the grass  
Falls on the 'round toes  
On the high shoes  
Of the old friends._

\- Simon & Garfunkel, "Old Friends"

~*~  
Chapter 16: Undertow  
~*~

Deekin dangled from my grip. "Read my lips," I said. "I did not have sexual relations with that sorcerer."

The little kobold tried his most ingratiating grin. "Oh, come on, Boss." His inner eyelid shot across his eye and back again, the kobold version of an innocent blink and a damnably familiar sight. "It just be a little artistic license-"

"And I never shot lightning out of my eyes, mouth, or in fact any other orifice," I rasped on. "And I never said any of those things you claim I said to Heurodis, and I sure as hell didn't do what you said I did with Kel-Garas, or with that entire group of Ao worshippers-"

"O-kay, maybe it be a lot of artistic license." Deekin poked at my wrist experimentally, saw I wasn't letting go, and lowered his hand with a sigh. "Sorry, Boss. Deekin tried to tell the true story, Boss. Really, he did."

I glared at him. "Yeah? So what happened?"

Deekin winced. "Nobody read it. Deekin couldn't even sell one copy. Sorry. Turns out, the truth be kinda boring."

Linu stood, brushing herself off. "Well," she said, looking back and forth between us. "I shall leave you two alone to get reacquainted, shall I?"

I didn't take my eyes off of the little lizard's. "Yes, please, thank you," I said. Deekin winced again.

The door closed behind her with a soft click.

Deekin stared at me. "Um, Boss?"

I stared back. "What?"

"Isn't your arm getting tired?"

It was. "No. How did you get here? Were you following me?"

The little kobold twitched. "No! Deekin knows better than that." His eyes met mine, suddenly and uncharacteristically filled with something like anger. "Boss make it clear Deekin can't come with her, remember?"

I held his stare a moment longer. Then I broke it off and set him down. "That was for your own good," I said curtly.

Deekin crouched down immediately, regarding me from under brow ridges covered in tiny horns and tinier scales. "Was it? 'Cause you said you was gonna go home, but it not look like you go home, Boss. Why not? You not find the right portal?"

I swallowed, turned away from him, and crossed my arms over my chest. "I found it. But I changed my mind."

I heard a scrape of claws. "O-kay. So why you not come back to Deekin and mean green man?" Reproach and hurt turned Deekin's voice so quiet I barely heard his next words. "You change your mind about us, too?"

I spun. "No, I-" I couldn't think of what to say.

Deekin looked at me steadily. Then, sighing, he looked down, drawing aimless patterns on the floor with the tip of one claw. "It be fine. Really. Deekin understands. No one wants a little kobold around. Green man didn't. He yelled and set a few things on fire and then he left. Deekin not seen him since."

I flinched. "How upset was he?" I croaked.

"Um. Well. When Deekin say green man set a few things on fire, it not totally accurate. It more like just one building. But it, um. Kind of be the whole Ao temple. And he not set it on fire so much as he, um, burn it down. It kind of fun to watch, actually. Deekin never seen stone melt before." Deekin scratched his chin pensively. Scales rasped. "Green man do it while they all asleep in the camp so he not actually kill anybody, but still, Ao worshippers got real shirty about the whole thing. Deekin pretty sure green man be shot on sight if he ever go back to that part of the desert."

 _Shit._ It was one thing to suspect how badly I'd pissed Xanos off, another to have it confirmed. I dropped bonelessly into the nearest chair and stared at Deekin. He had, I noticed, found a few mismatched scraps of armor somewhere - wrist bracers worn on his skinny arms, one steel and one leather, a leather jerkin that might have belonged to a halfling, two leg guards cut down from one and strapped to his thighs with leather thongs, and all of it buckled or tied on over a surprisingly well-kept blue tunic that went down to his knees. His belt held a keen little dirk, a crossbow, a quiver full of bolts, and a pouch with a couple of quills sticking out of it. His bag had gotten an upgrade, too, from the old rope-bound sack he used to carry around to a leather pack with real straps. All in all, he looked like he'd been doing okay for himself despite me leaving him in a lurch.

The kobold also had, I couldn't help but notice, a pair of cymbals strapped to his pack. Apparently, he'd given up on drums as too complicated and settled on the musical equivalent of banging two pot lids together. I didn't know why I was surprised. For a bard, he'd always been particularly bad at carrying a tune.

Deekin studied me as I studied him. "Boss?" he asked.

I grunted, looking down at my boots – which was kind of appropriate, because I felt like a heel. "Yeah?"

"Deekin heard…you be attacked by drow?"

I closed my eyes. "Yeah. I was."

"Oh." There was a pause. "Any idea why?"

My heart fluttered with incipient panic. I tried to breathe it away. "No."

"Oh." I heard him shuffle closer. "Boss, you gots to know…Deekin never said anything to anyone," he said, lowering his voice. "About you. About your secret. His lips be sealed. Quill, too. He not put it in the epic tale. Green man even burned the letter you wrote, just to make sure nobody ever find out."

Xanos had done that for me, even in his anger? My eyes prickled. Angrily, I swiped my forefinger beneath my lower lashes. This whole situation was going to have me blubbering twenty-four-seven before long. "Thanks, Deeks."

"No problem." He looked over his shoulder at the door, then back at me, blinking. "So, uh, why did you change your mind? About going home, Deekin means."

Why, indeed? "I…guess I realized it wasn't really home anymore."

The kobold cocked his head. "Yeah, Deekin thinks he understands," he said thoughtfully. "Deekin thinks sometimes about going back to the kobold caves and old master. Deekin left for lots of good reasons and he probably be really unhappy and not feel at home at all if he tries to go back, but it did used to be home, so…sometimes Deekin thinks about it. Especially when people aren't being very nice to Deekin." He trailed off into a shrug. "So, uh. Deekin still not understanding why you didn't just come back and tell us you changes your mind?"

I shrugged. "I didn't know where you were," I said. I felt my cheeks flush. "Plus, you were probably gonna be angry. I did spike your wine and skip town on you."

Deekin stared at me with wide eyes. "So Boss is saying she really not come back just 'cause she was scared we maybe be angry and we gonna yell at her and hate her forever and ever?"

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. "Well, I mean, yeah, basically, when you put it _that_ way…"

Deekin kept staring. "Boss, sometimes you can be awfully silly. You know if you just came back and told us what happened and said you was sorry, even green man probably understand and stop being angry? But if you vanish and not come back, we just keep being angry 'cause we don't know better? You… _can_ figure that out, right, Boss? Deekin knows sometimes you not think things through, but this be bad, even for you."

I scowled. I could feel my cheeks going red. "Okay, _fine_ , so I'm not actually very heroic. Or smart." I leaned back in my chair, legs sprawled out in front of me and arms draped over the sides. "News at eleven."

The kobold hmph'ed. "Oh, no, Boss, you not gettin' off that easy. You not really that dumb or that much of a coward, so that be no excuse," he said. Then he sighed. "But Deekin thinks maybe everybody gots the right to do silly things sometimes - even epic heroes." He shifted. "It…be real good to see you, though," he added, his voice oddly tentative.

I stared at him, then let my head drop against the back of the chair. "How do you do it?"

"Do what?

"I've spent the past year and a half angry at you, and now that you're here in front of me, I can't seem to be angry anymore."

The kobold's face relaxed into a lopsided little grin. "Oh, that just be part of Deekin's astonishing kobold charm."

"It's pretty surprising, all right," I agreed drily.

"Hah! You want surprising? You gotta see Deekin's new trick." The little bard hummed tunelessly. Slowly, his nose turned bright green, his arms turned neon purple, and his tail turned a disquieting shade of pink while his tiny horns lengthened until they were like a dragon's crest. He looked at himself appraisingly. "Pretty neat, huh?"

It did look like it could be real, if psychedelic kobolds were a thing that existed. "It's great," I said, my voice strained. "But could you maybe tone it down a little? It's hurting my eyes."

Deekin grinned. In an instant, his horns were stubby again, and all of the color had bled from him, leaving him his normal dull grey. "Sorry, Boss."

A knock at the door made us both jump. "Little noble?" Magda's voice called. "Are you in there? The elf woman is trying to take the demon child away and I need to know if you have agreed to this or if I need to slay the cleric where she stands."

I groaned. "Shit. I almost forgot." I flailed my way out of the chair and raised my voice. "I'm here, Mags. It's fine." I wrenched open the door. "Please don't kill Linu," I added breathlessly. "Linu is a nice and helpful person and we don't kill nice and helpful people, okay?"

Mags raised her eyebrows. "If you say so," she said dubiously. She looked past me, blinked, and leaned over to get a better view of what was behind me. "Rebecca?"

"Yeah?"

"Who is this tiny lizard man with the very large smile?" Her eyes widened. "Wait. Is that-"

I felt claws touch the back of my leg and saw Deekin's head peek around my knee. He was smiling toothily. "Hullo. I be Deekin. Deekin Scalesinger. You a friend of Boss's?"

Magda looked from me to Deekin, a disbelieving grin spreading across her face. "This is he!" she exclaimed. "This is your little kobold friend who wrote that terrible book!" Before I could do more than blink, she'd knelt in front of me and extended a hand to Deekin. "Magda Thunderbeast. I am pleased to meet you, little lizard man." Her hand engulfed his briefly. Then she stood. "Come. It seems that we must see the demon child off. Then we will talk." She led the way out of the door and down the hall. "So, little lizard, what brings you to Waterdeep?" she asked the kobold as we walked. "Are you visiting with the little noble?"

Deekin had to trot to keep up with us. "Oh, Deekin been staying in Waterdeep for a while. He wanted to see the big city, see what all the fuss be about. Then he heard there be a call for epic heroes so he came to the Yawning Portal." His eyes flicked to me and back, and a sly little edge came into his voice. "Imagine little Deekin's surprise when he finds Boss here, whom he not seen in so long."

Mags guffawed. "Are you planning on saving Waterdeep, then?"

The kobold waved his hand. "Oh, no, no, no," he demurred. "Deekin not be any kind of epic hero. But he hopes maybe there be epic heroes here, so he decided to come find one to write about. Deekin not look like much, but he writes best-selling hit, so he figures, hey, maybe somebody volunteer to be in next one." He paused, his smile slipping slightly. "Waterdeep not all it cracked up to be, though."

Mags raised an eyebrow. "Is the city not exciting enough for you?"

"It is, but, well, the people not be very nice," Deekin admitted. "They yell at little Deekin. And spit on little Deekin. And kick little Deekin. And hit little Deekin with brooms and call him a dirty smelly ugly kobold. In sum, things not go as well as Deekin hoped." The kobold cleared his throat raspily. "So, um. Deekin not even really have a place to stay yet. Nobody wants to rent Deekin a room, so Deekin slept in cold gutters for a while before a nice half-orc let Deekin sleep in his stable. That not be so bad." His snout wrinkled. "Horses be a little whiffy on the nose, though."

If this was supposed to make me feel guilty, I had news for Deekin: it was working. "Hasn't Durnan let you stay here?"

"Er." Deekin scratched the side of his snout and avoided my eyes. "Deekin didn't actually tell anyone he be here, yet. As such."

The penny dropped. I gave Deekin a level stare. "Deekin. Are you the reason chef's biscuits keep disappearing?"

The kobold grinned bashfully. "Sorry. Deekin was hungry, and the biscuits was tasty."

I sighed. I should've known we had a kobold infestation. This explained all of the running footsteps and slamming doors, too. The little shit had been _dodging_ me.

We reached the common room. Linu turned away from the door and smiled in relief. "There you are," she said. She laid a light hand on Nat's shoulder. "I was afraid we would have to leave without saying goodbye."

Nat's expression was a preteen mélange of resignation, sulkiness, and resentment. "Do we have to go now?" she asked plaintively. Her fingers kneaded Smelly's ruff. "I was having fun talking to Tomi. He was showing me how to juggle knives."

Linu gave Tomi a long, disapproving look. He gave her a shit-eating grin. The cleric wrinkled her nose, then turned back to the kid. "I am afraid we must," she answered. "It is best to go while we have full light."

Sharwyn was leaning against the wall, her long legs crossed at the ankles. "You have the potions I gave you?"

Linu touched her pack. "We do. Thank you again. Between my spells and these potions, we should be able to remain unseen at least until we exit the city."

Nat sighed.

I crouched in front of Smelly. "So, you're going with them, huh?" He whined and thumped his tail, looking between Nat and me. "It's okay," I reassured him. "The old man's got my back. I'll be fine." I really wouldn't, but what was one wolf going to do against a bunch of drow? I patted him on the shoulder, listening to the solid thump of my hand against his muscled side and feeling a little sad. I'd never expected us to share the road for long, but now that our roads were diverging, I realized that I was going to miss the big guy. "Go," I said. On an impulse, I knelt and wrapped my arms around his neck. He stank, but I didn't mind. "Do what you came here to do. Keep the kid safe." The wolf whuffed once and nudged my cheek with his cold, wet nose. I rubbed his ears once last time and stood. Then, with a sigh, I turned to Nat. "So," I said. "You're off."

Nat bit her lip. She looked up at Linu, then back at me. "Thanks," she said. The word came out as if she'd needed a crowbar. "For coming after me. I guess."

I sorted through a lot of potential replies, then settled on the nicest one. She was only ten, after all, and there was always hope that she'd be able to get over her attitude before she reached eighteen if only the adults around her could resist the urge to strangle her before she got there. Nobody'd murdered me, after all, and I'd taken well over eighteen years to stop being a complete asshole. "You're welcome," I said. I held my arms out and grinned mockingly, because maybe I'd stopped being a total asshole, but there was no way I'd ever stop being at least a little bit of a jerk. "Hug?"

That got a scowl, predictably. Then, to my everlasting surprise, the girl stepped forward, threw her arms around my middle, gave me a brief, hard squeeze, then stepped back, still scowling. "Don't die," she said. " _Somebody_ still has to teach me how to be a hero so I don't have to run away next time." She turned to Mags and gave her the same hug. "You don't die either. I'm sorry I tried to shoot you. I still would have gotten you if you hadn't ducked, though."

Then Linu was pulling Nat away, and just like that, they were gone.

Sighing gustily, Mags wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "Together, we have raised a fine young adventurer," she said. "'Tis just a pity she inherited your temperament and my brains."

I snorted a laugh in spite of myself. "Poor Linu."

Sharwyn laughed. "Never fear," she said. She pushed herself away from the wall and sauntered over, the sway of her hips so practiced that I didn't think she was even consciously aware of doing it. "She will be fine. As for us, when the rest of the volunteers get here and Durnan opens the well to us all, we'll all go down together and get to the bottom of this." She clapped a hand on my shoulder. "A Windwalker pulled me out of a fire once. Literally. We'd run afoul of a conjurer with a wand of fire elemental summoning. I owe your kind and your god a favor, and it seems this is my chance to pay up."

Daelan was nodding. "Your problems seem linked to these attacks," he said. "We came here to find the source of these attacks and stop them. If we do that, the city should be safe, and you as well."

Tomi grinned. "Hear, hear," he agreed. "A boatload of gold for us, relief for Waterdeep, and a lifetime of not getting murdered in her sleep for the lady."

"You're too kind," I said, but felt my shoulders unwind in relief. Thanks to Shaundakul's good name, the enlightened self-interest of career adventurers, and maybe even to Deekin's errant quill, I had people in my corner. I wasn't going to have to deal with this alone. "And…thanks."

* * *

Mhaere placed a jar of twisted little brown twig-like things and potion vial on the counter. Her hands were strong and calloused, more suited to a fighter than to an innkeeper's wife. "There. Some dried nararoot, and I believe that is the last of our healing potions. I apologize for the dearth. I am afraid that the rest of the adventurers have somewhat exhausted our stock."

I added the potion and nararoot to my collection and kept packing. I slipped half a dozen tiny vials of choking powder into my potions pouch. They weren't Farghan's, but they'd have to do. A couple of vials of holy water and two strong healing potions went in next to them, to stay close at hand, and the rest I swaddled carefully and slipped into a side pocket of the small traveling pack Mhaere had found for me. It was a piss poor replacement for my old pack – the straps didn't fit right, the leather wasn't as good, and I just plain _missed_ mine. That thing had been my constant companion since Hilltop. Still, this one was free and it was better than nothing. "I understand," I said. "I just wish I had the time and ingredients to make more."

Mhaere shook her head, her lips a thin grim line. "With the quarantine and the blockades, I suspect that we are limited to whatever materials we have in this building," she said. She squared her shoulders. Those were broad and athletic, just like her hands. "Ah, well. This dark time shall pass and dawn will come, as it always does."

Luckbringers and Dawnbringers: two groups who thought a positive attitude and joie de vivre could overcome anything, including fifty-to-one odds. "Let's hope we're not all six feet under when the dawn comes, then. Otherwise we'll have a hard time enjoying the view."

Mhaere's cheeks dimpled. "You are not much of an optimist, are you?" She patted my hand and went on without waiting for an answer. "That is all right. I am enough of an optimist for both of us." She bent to rummage beneath the counter. "Now, I could swear we had extra bandage cloths down here-"

Downstairs, somebody started shouting.

I jumped about a mile. Potions flew, knocked by my flailing hands. One shattered, spilling glistening blue fluid all over the floorboards.

Mhaere jerked upright. "What in the-"

The door from the storeroom to the hall was ajar. Through it, the light of a spell flared.

Then – darkness, darkness so thick it was like staring into an open grave.

Mhaere grabbed a morningstar from the weapons rack. "Come," she snapped, and ran out of the door before I could answer.

I hesitated, then grabbed my borrowed quarterstaff and ran after her.

We ran into the dark. I heard an annoyed 'tsk' from Mhaere, then a shout that was half a command and half a plea. "Morninglord, grant me light!" Light sparked, then unfurled into rays of sunlight, spilling from the palm of Mhaere's left hand. Warm yellow light shoved the darkness back.

A shadowy figured twisted, froze in the sudden onslaught of light. I saw a dark face, white hair, and startlingly violet eyes. I sucked in a breath. "Hold still!" I shouted, and the drow twitched. Then I felt the command flow off of him like water off a duck's back, and he blinked and turned his head to look at me, seeming more annoyed than anything else.

I looked back, dismayed. _Oh, fuck._ That trick usually worked.

Then I didn't have to worry anymore, because Mhaere dashed in front of me and bashed my would-be opponent in the face so hard she effectively pushed it from the front of his head to the back. "To me!" she cried, and ran down the hall, holding the sun in one hand and a gore-covered morningstar in the other. I blinked a few times. Then I shrugged, stepped over the body, and followed.

The common room was a mess. There were corpses everywhere – splayed on the floor, collapsed on the tables, bleeding all over Durnan's prize Kara-Turan rug. A lot of the corpses were drow. Some were locals, refugees and adventurers alike. The ambush had taken them all out indiscriminately, just like that.

The only people still standing were Sharwyn, Daelan, Tomi, and Mags. I couldn't see Deekin. I hoped he was hiding. Sharwyn had her hand pressed to her side, where a shallow gash had split her leathers. "The well," she gasped. "They must have broken through."

Daelan's eyes had taken on a wild, hot glow, and his lips had drawn back from his teeth in a snarl that showed incisors too long to be human, and _now,_ at last, he looked a little like Xanos. "To the well, then."

They all took off, Tomi and Mhaere bringing up the rear.

I managed to stop Mags from following suit by the simple expedient of grabbing the back of her breastplate. "No!" I barked. My heels dug into wooden floorboards, slipping. "Wait!"

Magda reeled. She wrenched her shoulders, throwing me off. She spun. "What?" she roared. "Do not presume to keep me from a fight, little lady!"

I fought to regain my balance. "A fight?" I yelled back. "It's an ambush, you dingus! You don't run into an ambush willy-nilly!" I slapped a hand on her shoulder and breathed out, sending the essence of fast winds into her. Then I yanked a healing potion out of my bag, and threw it to her. "Okay. _Now_ go!"

Downstairs, chaos reigned. Drow and adventurers surged back and forth across a platform over a deep pit, while behind them, shadows moved and _something_ heaved into view, eyes turning on long stalks.

The sight tripped the trigger of a flood of memories. I remembered the soft whisper of pages, the smell of lavender and oak, rain pattering on the windows, tea, and a heavy bestiary open on my lap. Drogan hadn't succeeded in making me memorize the whole thing, but some pages had been so blood-curdling that they were impossible to forget. "Beholder!" I shouted, and threw myself at Mags, bringing both of us down to the floor. Something flashed overhead. I didn't look to see what it was. As long as I was alive and moving, the rest was irrelevant.

Then: more shouting, confused and lost in the clatter and jangle of a turning windlass.

After that, everything was quiet except for the cursing. It seemed to be coming from Durnan.

I flailed my way up to a sitting position just in time to see Mhaere run past me. She ran to Durnan, skidding the last few feet on her knees. Her hands went for his shoulders, pulling him upright. "My love," she said urgently. "Are you all right? Do you need healing?"

Durnan shook his head, though he held tight to her forearm as she pulled him to his feet. "I'm fine, I'm fine. Just a little stunned. It caught me with the edge of a sleep ray." He twisted, peering down into the pit. His face twisted, too, like he'd just barely kept himself from spitting over the side and into the black. "Those bloody fools," he said bitterly. "You don't rush into Undermountain like that."

Mags was sitting up, her hand to her head. "What _was_ that?"

"A beholder," I said. It seemed that my year in Drogan's school hadn't been for nothing. Sometimes I wondered. "Looks like they all ran after it." My heart fell into my boots. "Damn it." I'd been counting on them for help.

A kobold snout poked around the edge of the staircase. "Er. It be safe to come out now?"

Deekin obviously believed in the discretion part of valor over the actual valor part of valor. "Yeah," I said. "I think so."

Durnan shook his head. "If drow are breaking through the dome, nothing is safe." He drew in a tentative breath, a hand going to his ribs. His other hand waved vaguely at Mhaere. "No, I am fine. Just bruised." He raised his eyes, studying me gravely. "What of the others?" he asked.

I thought of all the corpses strewn above. "Dead," I said quietly. "Looks like the drow caught them off guard."

Durnan's hand rubbed his forehead. "By all the gods. This is worse than we thought."

Mags looked at me. Her jaw tightened. "We are all that is left?"

"From the looks of it?" Durnan sighed. "Aye."

We couldn't wait for reinforcements. For all I knew there was another assassination attempt scheduled for tonight. I had to keep moving. Had to find out who wanted me dead. Had to find Silent Partner. I'd promised Harry. More – I _needed_ Silent Partner. I needed it to remind me how to be good. "This is insane," I said. "I can't go in there…not like this. Not now."

Mhaere twisted to look over her shoulder. "I fear that you must," she said. Her eyes studied my face, and she offered a reassuring smile. "Take heart, Windwalker. They are experienced adventurers. They will be well."

"And even if they are not, you will not be alone, little noble." I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Mags, her face pale and solemn in the dim light of the basement. "You are my friend," she told me firmly. "We have laughed together, wept together, fought together, and gotten falling-down drunk together." Her hand tightened on my shoulder, almost painfully. "Did you think Magda Thunderbeast would let a friend face Undermountain alone?" Then her grip eased, and a smile ghosted across her face. "Besides, I am curious to see what the fabled Undermountain is like, and I would not mind some of its treasure for myself."

Durnan leaned on Mhaere, his face drawn. Whatever the beholder had done to him, it hadn't been fatal but still hadn't been good. "Just be wary," he warned. "Undermountain often uses treasure – or even the illusion of treasure – to lure unwary adventurers into traps."

Mags sniffed. "Magda is not so stupid as that. She will be careful."

I felt a touch on my leg and looked down, startled. Deekin wrinkled his snout at me. "Deekin not letting you run off and leave him alone again," he scolded me. "It be bad enough the first time. Besides, Deekin came here for an epic tale, and where better to look than in Undermountain? This be exactly what Deekin hoping for – a hero and an adventure worth writing about." His spindly hand patted my knee. "Don't worry. Deekin lets you proofread this one."

I let out a shaky laugh. "No offense, Deeks. But I hope this is gonna be a short, boring story with a happy ending."

The kobold shrugged. "None taken," he said. His clawed fingers tapped his quill. "But Deekin gonna keep his quill sharp, just in case."


	17. Undermountain

_A/N: See the end of the chapter for some spoilery comments on this chapter._

* * *

 _There's no place to hide down here  
_ _No place to hide down here  
_ _Went to the rock got on my knees  
_ _I heard the angels weep for me  
_ _There's no place to hide down here_

\- Jave Everett, "No Place to Hide

~*~  
Chapter 17: Undermountain  
~*~

Chains rattled, lowering us into the deep.

I held on to the bars of the cage. Shadow and light stuttered past, with shadow gradually winning. Stone and steel - _white, snow, crushing_ – surrounded me. I tried to breathe. I couldn't breathe. Cold sweat sprung out on my forehead.

 _Shaundakul help me, I hate this._ My breaths started to take on the notes of a sob. Grimly, I gritted my teeth and held it all in. Hate or not, it had to be done or else I was dead, so I rode the descent out and held onto the bars of the cage until my hands cramped.

We hit bottom with a clang and a jerk. The cage swung open. I pried my hands away from the bars and practically fell out of there, sucking in air with harsh, hoarse breaths. Dark pressed in on me, but at least now I could feel air all around me.

The others followed. "You all right, Boss?"

My heart was stuttering, while my skin felt damp and clammy. "Okay," I croaked.

I felt claws settle on my thigh. The kobold's eyes, when I met them, were unusually grave. He knew. He'd been under the ground with me before, and he knew about the avalanche that had buried me and almost killed me. "It be okay, Boss. We be down here. The ceiling be up there. It not be moving. Okay?"

I managed a jerky nod. "Okay," I said, and drew in a long, deep breath. "I'm okay."

A frail hand patted my leg. "Look," Deekin said then. "There's the gate."

I pulled my eyes up. We were in a cavern, a big one. This wasn't a cave. This was a wound carved in the earth, and binding one end of it was a gilded gate.

The gate opened easily when Magda touched it, swinging into a corridor lined with twinkling little mage lights.

We found Sharwyn at the end of the hall, where it turned into a three-way intersection.

The bard was curled on her side, as if sleeping. I turned her over. Her eyes were open, her face was flushed cherry red, and rivulets of blood were drying beneath her nose and at the corners of her mouth.

I stared at her. In my second sight, the bard's blood pooled still and her heart sat silent. " _Fuck_. And I liked her, too."

Mags stepped closer. "Is there any hope?"

"No," I said. The bard's skin was already cooling. "She's gone." I sniffed. A strange, acrid smell was in the air. My eyes scanned the bard's body, searching. Fletching stuck out from her side – a crossbow bolt, from the looks of it. When I bent close, the smell got stronger. Farghan's teaching came back to me. I held out a hand. "Careful. I think that bolt was poisoned. Don't touch it."

Magda crouched by the body, her face grim. "Drow. It must be. Only ones as dishonorable as drow would resort to poison."

Deekin crept near. "How they be coming through? Durnan said that Halaster controls this place and keeps things like drow out."

The answer seemed obvious. "Then something must have happened to Halaster," I said. "Or else they wouldn't be here."

I saw Deekin's throat spasm as he swallowed. "That not be good."

I closed Sharywn's eyes. I'd liked her, thought we might even have been friends, given time. That obviously wasn't going to happen now. "No shit."

Deekin was shaking his head. "No," he said urgently. "Boss. You don't understand. Listen. This place, it's…it's not a place that _should_ be." His gesture took in the gilded gate and the stone walls of the corridor and the mage lights and everything past them. "It be unnatural. All the stories say so, and even if you not know the stories you can smell it." He wrinkled his snout. "Well, Deekin can, anyway, and trust Deekin, it smells _real_ funny. He can feel the magic, too, and it feels…stretched, like."

It was a hell of a thing to feel dumber than a talking lizard. "I don't get it. Stretched? Stretched how?"

The little bard waved his long, skinny hands as if sculpting the substance of his words from the air. "Deekin means…he means the magic feels all out of shape, like it gotta fight real hard to keep this place in one piece – and the older the spells feel, the more stretched they be. If Halaster not be here to sustain the spells, Deekin thinks maybe…" Deekin brought his hands together, then jerked them apart. "Poof."

I stared at the kobold. "Whaddya mean, _poof_?"

He stared back. "I mean poof."

"Yeah, okay, but what kind of poof we talking about here? Little poof? Big poof?"

Deekin looked around. Somewhere deeper in Undermountain, something rumbled, sending fine tremors through the floor under our feet. "Big poof," he said. "Big, biiiig poof."

I looked around uneasily. "But Undermountain's still here."

"Right. So Halaster must be alive, or else _poof_!"

"Then what are drow doing here?"

Deekin shrugged. "They must have done something to him. It not be the first time. A few years ago, the Twisted Rune kidnaps Halaster and tells him, 'You tell us all your secrets now.' and Undermountain gets out of control and Waterdeep asks for adventurers to help. Deekin been hearing the story all the time, lately."

I blinked. "You're telling me this isn't the first time Halaster's gotten wizard-napped and Waterdeep got eaten by monsters as a result?" I asked. Deekin nodded solemnly. "Good. Remind me never to move to Waterdeep." The place seemed to get destroyed more often than Tokyo.

"Eh, it not so bad. Some adventurers rescue Halaster and he go back and everything okay again." Deekin blinked worriedly. "Er. Until now, anyway."

The mage lights flickered, filling the corners with shadows. I peered into them, uneasy. "So the drow caught the archmage, huh? Great. I am so not liking this."

Magda stood. "Bah," she said, her voice hearty. "Stop being so negative. We have only just begun." She looked around speculatively. "I think we should find the others, first. If they are alive, we will be able to pool our resources. If they are hurt, they will need help. And if they are dead, we must know it."

"Right." I took one last look at Sharwyn, then grimaced and stood, looking back and forth. The hall stretched out east and west and south. "Which way?"

Mags shrugged. "You are the Pathfinder," she said. "You choose."

If that wasn't passing the buck, I didn't know what was. Still, when I focused on it I could feel my compass sense tugging at me, a steady and reassuring pull which told me where north was even if I couldn't see the sun. One direction seemed as good as any other, so I picked my way down the western hall, the others close behind.

I saw a red glow shining at the far end of the corridor and felt air move against my face, furnace-hot. A few more steps, and we found the source of the heat – an enormous pool of lava with an island rising from the middle.

I stared. "Aaaand now we're in the supervillain's lair. Fan-fucking-tastic. All it needs now is a shark tank and a bald guy petting a white cat."

Deekin stretched his head out on his neck and sniffed the air, wincing. "Yeah, Deekin not know what all that means. But he pretty sure he not want to trip and fall in that lava."

Further investigation showed that there was a bridge leading to the island, but it was blocked by a complicated series of gates and levers. It seemed clear that the others hadn't been able to open the gates, so we left them there for later investigation and skirted around the edge of the pool, instead. First order of business was to regroup, if we could. The more people we had, the safer we'd be.

The big central chamber soon broke into more halls. I chose corridors heading west if I could, north if I couldn't, fixing the turns and little identifying landmarks in my head.

We were creeping down the hallway when Deekin raised his hand. "Listen," he said.

I listened. At first, I didn't hear anything. Then, several seconds later, I heard a whine that quickly turned into a high-pitched screams, changing in pitch as it shot down the hall towards us. Green light flickered and grew.

That old _holy-shit-there's-something-flying-at-my-head_ instinct kicked in. Mags and I both dropped to our stomachs. I rolled over in time to see three bright green blurs zip overhead, trailing sparkly green dust. Their screams faded.

Deekin was still standing. He hadn't had to duck, since he was a little under three feet tall and therefore basically perma-ducked. "Those were faeries," he said disbelievingly. "What faeries be doing here?"

I sat up, watching the sparkles fade. "Where were they going?"

"Dunno, but they sure looked like they was running from something."

Mags climbed to her feet. "Wonderful," she said. "So where are we going?"

I stood and started after the fading green sparkles. "Away from whatever they were running from," I answered decisively.

Only a few tense minutes went past before another sound echoed down the hall, this time a roar.

There was a doorway-shaped niche in the wall. Without hesitating, I threw myself into it, dragging Mags and Deekin with me.

The roaring got louder fast. Figures roiled past us, struggling – a huge ugly thing with a bulbous nose and a club, spinning in circles and flailing at the slim black-skinned shape clinging to it. As we watched, the ogre tore the drow off of its back and slammed the elf against the wall. There was a loud crack. The body slid down the wall, leaving a long smear of gore on the stone. The ogre stood over it for a moment, swaying. Then, very slowly, like a mighty sequoia about to be reborn as several thousand tons of 'Save the Trees!' leaflets, it fell over. A drow dagger was sticking out of its back. Black steam rose off of the wound.

We all stepped gingerly out of the niche. "Bloody wizards and their bloody unnatural death dungeons," Magda grumbled. "This place makes no sense."

The ground lurched again beneath my feet. The mage lights flickered, and somewhere, I heard the squeal and groan of metal under heavy strain. "Deekin's right. I get the feeling Undermountain's even crazier than usual right now," I said. I looked around warily. "Let's keep moving. I want to find the others. Maybe they'll be able to make sense of all this."

We found Daelan in a mirror-lined hall at the western edge of the maze of corridors.

The Uthgardt warrior of the Red Tiger clan was sprawled in front of a broken mirror, shards of glass littering the floor all around him. His face was almost peaceful, even if his body was covered in so many lacerations it almost looked as if he'd jumped through a window. My heart fell into my stomach.

Magda moved forward hesitantly, her eyes on the half-orc's dead face. I saw her face and I winced. "I'm sorry, Mags."

The Uthgardt knelt heavily by Daelan's corpse. "Do not be," she said, her voice as quiet as I'd ever heard it. "I barely knew him. We only lay together for one night."

"Yeah," I said softly. "But one night can still make a mark, sometimes." I shifted my feet. "You want a moment alone?"

"No." Magda's fingers drifted along the half-orc's pale cheek, then drew down his lids to hide his glazed eyes and give him a fraction of his dignity back. "Sleep well, warrior," she said. Her thumb brushed his lips. "I am glad to have known you." Then she stood, and turned away. "We should move on. We can do nothing here."

I nodded and turned. My eyes fell on one of the mirrors, and I stopped.

At first glance, the woman in the mirror looked perfectly familiar. She was me - sharp-faced, tall, lanky, with eyes of an indeterminate and unremarkable shade of hazel, the tanned olive skin of a habitual outdoorswoman, and a shoulder-skimming mop of dark hair so curly it didn't have a length so much as it had a radius. Some people's hair had body. Mine had bodies. In the basement.

There was something off about the reflection, though – a distortion of some kind, like the subtler kind of a funhouse mirror. It was the eyes, I decided. I was staring into the mirror, but my reflection's eyes were blank, dead, and above all, they weren't actually looking back at me at all, but at some point behind me and off to the side.

I stood as still as a statue and saw the woman in the mirror step nearer to the glass. "What the-" I started to say, then threw my arms up to shield my face as glass shattered.

My reflection stepped out of the mirror, quarterstaff humming as it swung. I dodged and brought my own staff up, but my mirror image seemed to know exactly the way I was going to swing, and she sidestepped before bringing her staff up only now _I_ knew what _she_ was going to do and I blocked the blow before it landed, staggering a little as the unfamiliar weight and balance of this new quarterstaff threw my own balance off.

Wood struck wood. My reflection and I heaved back and forth, equally matched. Magda hung back, standing on the balls of her feet and starting forward every moment just to draw back the next. "Get out of the way!" she shouted. "I cannot hit it with you in the way!"

"I can't get out of the way!" My reflection fought exactly like I did, which was how I knew that if I turned my back on her I was going to get a quarterstaff right up Main Street. I countered her jab with a desperate side swipe and followed up with a clumsy swing at my reflection's knees, which she hopped over like she was playing jump rope. This staff felt wrong, wrong, wrong. I kind of hated it. "Deekin!" I shouted, between strikes. I blocked a downwards swing at my head, the shock of it reverberating through my arms. Then, with a desperate heave, I tried to shove my reflection back. Her booted feet slipped on the floor, but she was exactly as strong as me, and after a brief scrabble, she held. We stood at a standstill, neither of us gaining or losing ground. "Deeks! Little help here!"

My reflection looked at me. Her eyes flickered. "Deeks. Little help here," she echoed in a voice that sounded like mine but had had all the emotion and inflection stripped from it.

Finally, a crossbow twanged. Fletching appeared in the side of my reflection's throat. Blood bubbled around the wound. Then, soundless and never losing her blank expression, my reflection wavered and vanished.

Overbalanced, I fell over. My staff hit the floor with a clatter, and my hand went to my throat. It was whole, but it was going to take a lot of alcohol to scrub my brain of the image of a crossbow bolt in my own jugular. "Thanks," I said hoarsely.

Deekin rewound his crossbow. "No problem, Boss."

Mags blew out a breath. "Well shot, little lizard-man. How did you know which one to shoot?"

The kobold grinned. "Boss yells a lot," he said. He pointed at me. "She was yelling." He pointed at the mirror. "She wasn't." He shrugged. "Easy peasy."

My hand groped for the staff a few times before managing to get a hold of it. I stood. "Okay. Valuable lesson: don't look in any mirrors, and if you do, scream a lot so Deekin knows not to shoot you." I ran a hand through my hair. "Let's move on. We still need to find Tomi. If he's alive." I looked at Mags. "You need a moment?"

She shook her head. "No," she said. She didn't look back at Daelan. "There is nothing more to be gained by staying here. Let us find who is responsible for this and take revenge."

That was looking like a better and better idea all the time. "All right. Deeks, you take point and let us know if you see any more traps."

A second door led into another hallway. I drew some restless air around me, grateful there seemed to be some movement of air in these corridors, no doubt thanks to the heat of the lava meeting the underground chill. Bad enough that with the sky so far away, there were no storms within reach of my call. With no wind at all, I was afraid I'd eventually become useless. I needed moving air to shape. I wasn't used to this – these shadows, this still air, and the choking weight of stone above my head.

I had no way to measure time except by our footsteps and the slow growth of my mental map. We turned and turned again, hunting for clues or at least a stair down.

We were heading east-by-southeast down a narrow corridor when something zipped towards us and then, thanks to my little shield of air, just as suddenly zipped to the side and clattered against the wall.

I stopped. Red eyes glowed in the dark in front of us. Voices called, lilting and slithering. Someone started casting a spell. Another bolt bounced off of my shield. A soft laugh came out of the dark.

I steadied my shield. "Run," I said, and suited word to action.

I led the way back the way we'd come, giving up on stealth for speed. While we ran, I yanked a vial of choking powder from my belt pouch and threw it over my shoulder. It landed with a _pock_ of bursting glass and some startled shouts. It was good stuff – just the backwash of a few particles of it made my eyes water. Durnan didn't keep shoddy supplies.

We pounded by a doorway. I didn't pause. A door meant a solid half-foot of wood between me and those poisoned bolts. I wrenched the door open. "In," I said. Mags and Deekin surged past me without complaint. I followed.

Then the door slammed shut behind us, and we were in the dark.

* * *

 _A/N: While I know the fate of the old NWN companions played out differently in the game, I felt it was obviously there for the sake of giving the player some new companions to play with and really did nothing for the narrative. Having a magic "erase death" button just cheapens the impact of death and trivializes the real danger our heroes are facing, so I didn't use it. Sorry. :/_

 _On the bright side, I'm sure that Magda gave Daelan a hell of a send-off for his last night on earth. :D_


	18. Kings

_A/N: Last chapter until next weekend. Enjoy the earbug. I can't get this song out of my head, now.  
_

* * *

 _Oh yeah! It was like lightning  
_ _Everybody was fighting  
_ _And the music was soothing  
_ _And they all started grooving  
_

 _And the man in the back said everyone attack  
_ _And it turned into a ballroom blitz  
_ _And the girl in the corner said boy I want to warn you  
_ _It'll turn into a ballroom blitz_

\- The Sweet, "Ballroom Blitz"

~*~  
Chapter 18: Kings  
~*~

Dark choked me. I fumbled for the little fluorspar stone in my pocket. Its smooth, slight weight filled my hand, reassuring as a hug.

I lifted the stone to my mouth, pursed my lips, and blew out a gentle stream of air. _Let there be light,_ I thought. And there was light, slowly gathering strength in the palm of my hand and shining out from between my fingers. And, hey, it wasn't great and in fact it mostly just pushed the darkness a few feet back, but it was better than nothing.

I held the glowing stone high, looking around. This chamber was as big as a ballroom. Thrones sat against the walls, with skeletons seated on some of them. "Where the hell are we?" I asked, my voice hushed.

Claws and scales rustled over stone. Deekin hopped onto a stone column. His claws traced the letters on a corroded metal plaque. "Hall of the Sleeping Kings," he read.

I stepped away from the door. Something glittered underfoot, and I looked down to see a mosaic, fanning out in colored stone and glass tile. _Pretty,_ I thought. It occurred to me that it was quiet there. Too quiet. There should have been pursuit. Shouts. Something. Instead, there was just this smothering silence, and I didn't know whether it meant we were safe, or whether we were just about to die. That powder had been pretty potent, though. Maybe those drow were too busy hacking their lungs out to follow.

Deekin's voice wavered through the still air. "Um, Boss?"

I tried to breathe. It was way too dark in here. "What?"

"You might wanna look at this." The kobold was crouched in front of a stone throne, where a skeleton sat as if holding court. The corpse's pose was almost dignified, with its bony arms resting on the arms of the throne and a long, hooked knife placed in its bony fingers. Deekin looked over his shoulder as I approached, and he pointed at a plaque in the throne's base. "The Vivisectionist," he said.

I screamed a little on the inside. "Wow," I answered. "Bet he was a blast at parties. Seriously, though, why do we care about a skeleton in a chair again?"

"Dunno, but this be the Hall of Sleeping Kings, Boss. It says so on the plaque. Deekin gonna guess this be one of 'em."

"Well, don't wake him up." I still remembered that elven crypt Xanos and I had run into outside of Hilltop. Sometimes the dead in this world had a bad habit of getting up and walking. "Come on. I need your eyes. This is a big room. There has to be another way out that doesn't lead back where we came from."

"There is," a new voice said, and there were two things about this voice that I noticed right off the bat. One was that it had a weird metallic echo to it. The other was that it sounded as if it had an entire lumberyard worth of sticks up its ass. "If you pick me up, I might even show you."

I dropped into a defensive crouch, feeling for the reassuring whirl of air still moving around me. After this long, I'd learned to get my weapons ready first and ask questions later. "Who are you?" I demanded. My eyes combed the shadows at the far end of the chamber, trying without much success to see what was in them.

"My name," the voice said. "Is Enserric the Grey." It was a fussy voice, the kind that belonged to a guy with a little spit of a goatee and fingerless gloves and a permanent squint from too many hours spent reading in bad light. "Come over here. I cannot harm you, I assure you. I would merely like to ask a favor of you."

I followed the echoes of the voice, Deeks and Mags at my heels. We passed more kings, enthroned. Intricate glass mosaics arced above their heads like crowns, shining even through centuries of dust. To my relief, witchlights kindled as we walked, as if we'd just triggered some kind of magical motion sensors.

At last, we reached another crowned skeleton at the far end of the hall. It sat in its throne, grinning over the great black sword cradled in its arms.

The sword stood with its point on the seat of the skeleton's throne and its hilt and crosspiece resting against the back. It was a greatsword, although it was slimmer and shorter than Magda's, maybe four feet long, and a surprising amount of its length was taken up by a hilt wrapped in black silk cord. The blade was dull for about a hand's width above the crossguard, as if that part of it was meant more as an added grip than as a cutting edge. Past that, two spurs flared out to each side, echoing the crosspiece, and the sword gained a glossy, biting edge. I couldn't tell what metal it was made of, if it was even metal at all – it wasn't the silver of steel, but a black so dark it almost put me in mind of Silent Partner's zalantar, only this black had an almost translucent quality, like glass. Also like Silent Partner, the sword had a restless energy that made it seem almost alive, except rather than humming, it _sparkled_. Red points of light shimmered deep in the black, like strange stars in a stranger sky.

I stopped short of the throne. My foot brushed something that rattled. I looked down. There was another skeleton at the king's feet, this one wrapped in the remnants of a grey robe.

The voice spoke again. "Ah, much better," it said. "Now. To business."

The voice was close, so close we were practically on top of it. I looked at the skeletal king, confused. His lips definitely weren't moving, because he didn't have any lips.

"No, do not look at him, he is quite dead and not at all talkative," the voice went on impatiently. "Of course, I suppose I am technically dead as well, but that is quite besides the point. No pun intended."

Blinking, I looked down at the skeleton at the king's feet. Definitely not talking, either.

"Oh, gods, no," the voice said in disgust. "Not that either. Well, actually, that is me, or at least it _was_ , but let's not discuss that. Just look up, please, there's a dear."

Finally, I looked at the sword. It glittered suddenly and brightly, red sparks rippling through it like ashes in a sudden gust of wind. "Yes!" it said. "Thank you! At last, we have attained comprehension!" The voice lowered to a mutter. "I think. I wonder, are they breeding particularly dim adventurers these days, or this just a continuation of my own rotten luck?"

I stared at the sword. Then I leaned over. "Mags?" I said from the corner of my mouth.

The Uthgardt was staring at the sword as if it were a live snake. "Yes?"

"Is that sword talking?"

"I think so."

"Okay. Why is the sword talking?"

"Why are you asking me? Do you see me talking to Stormsplinter?"

"You know more about swords than I do."

"No, little noble, I have no idea why the sword is talking. Why don't you ask it?"

"I don't wanna."

"Why not?"

"Because it's a sword and it's talking, that's why."

The greatsword in the old king's lap flared red. "You ladies are not exactly a pair of raging intellectuals, are you?"

I shrugged. "Not really, no."

"I feared as much," the sword sighed. "Well, since this obviously needs some clarification: _yes_ , I am talking. To you. Any of you will do, really. Under the circumstances, I cannot afford to be choosy."

Deeks, Mags and I all exchanged suspicious glances. "All right," I said at last. "I'll bite. Who are you, and how did you get into that sword?

The sword sighed. More sparks gusted across the surface of its blade. "Oh, for the love of…very well. I will explain. My name, as I said, is Enserric the Grey." Its voice took on a bored, rushed sing-song, as if it had been through this story so many times it could hardly stand to hear itself tell it again. "I was a mage and adventurer of some renown, in my day. I was trapped in this sword when my adventuring party and I stumbled into this chamber and accidentally woke the kings who sleep here. As near as I can recollect, my soul was sucked into this sword when I was struck by it. I tried to flee from the effects of its enchantment and back into my own body, but it…did not work as I anticipated. Somehow, though my soul did not dissipate, neither did it return to my body. I ended up stuck in this blade, and here I have remained ever since." The sword dropped its sing-song tone. "There. That should explain everything. Now would you kindly stop gaping at me in that doltish manner and _get me the Hells out of here!_?"

"Er," Deekin said. "Out of the sword? Yeah, Deekin not sure he know how to do that."

"I do not mean for you to get me out of the sword," Enserric snapped. "I have been in here so long that I believe at this point I am quite inseparable from it, unfortunately. No, what I wish is for you to pick up my metal habitation and take us both away from this place. Do you have any idea how _dull_ it has been for me, to be stuck in this blasted tomb for all these years? I once spent six months attempting to count specks of dust. Dust! I used to be an _intellectual_ , and now look at me!" The sword's voice turned strident. "Just…take me! Kill something with me! Sell me on the black market! I do not care!"

I rolled my eyes. "Fine," I said. "If it'll shut you up." I moved to grab the sword.

Before I could finish the motion, Deekin put out a hand, halting me. "What happens if we pick you up?" he asked. "Specifically?"

The sword flickered for a moment. "Specifically? You would like a specific answer?"

The kobold put his hands on his hips. "That be what the word 'specifically' mean, yeah."

The sword was quiet a few moments longer. "Well," it said eventually, its voice prim. " _Specifically_ , I believe that you will wake the sleeping kings and they will do their best to kill you. If you simply _must_ know."

I lowered my hand. "Thanks, Deeks," I said. Thank god there was somebody in here with a brain. Shame it wasn't me, but that was old news and I had the grades to prove it. I turned away from the black sword. "Come on. Spread out and search. We need to find that door."

Enserric shouted after me, his voice desperate. "Wait! I can help you fight them. There is no guarantee you will lose! Come back!" I ignored him. His voice fell. "Oh, bugger it."

We moved along the walls, stepping past the sleeping kings on their thrones. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw something glitter in their eyes, and I made a point of stepping very wide and very carefully around those thrones.

An interminable while later, Deekin called out. "Found it!"

Mags and I rushed over. "Where was it?" I asked.

Deekin held back a dusty, ragged drape. "Behind the curtains. Why they gots curtains when they not gots any windows be beyond Deekin, though."

I breathed a sigh of relief. "To hide the doors, apparently," I said. Then I opened the door.

Spell-light flared in the outer corridor.

I slammed the door shut. "Back!" I barked, and took my own advice, running for the nearest throne.

We reached the rear of the chamber just as the door blew in.

I ducked behind a throne. From the other side of it, I heard Enserric's voice. "Back so soon?" he asked. "Have you changed your mind?"

A bolt struck the throne, and I flinched as a stinging little chip of stone hit my forehead. I touched my skin. My fingers came away bloody. "No," I said.

The sword hmph'ed. "Suit yourself."

Magda was getting tag-teamed by two drow at once. She was hard-pressed – she was bigger than them and a lot more agile than she looked, but there were two of them and they weren't just faster, they had two swords apiece and whirled them at her so fast that it was all she could do to parry and dodge.

Deekin's crossbow twanged. A drow fell, a bolt in his chest, and the kobold ducked behind another throne to reload.

Another drow was rushing me, and he had two swords, too. It seemed to be a thing they did down here. I spun away and put the throne between us. His swords raised sparks when they hit the stone, and he growled something at me, probably nothing nice. Then he was coming at me and it was all I could do to raise my quarterstaff in time to block his strikes, one-two, right in the middle of the staff.

The staff absorbed the first hit.

Then the second hit landed with a deafening crack, and I was suddenly holding two splintered lengths of staff, each of them quite a bit shorter than they should have been.

I reeled backwards. The drow's offhand sword scraped down my scales, narrowly missing my face. I lifted both hands with their two halves of quarterstaff, yanked the air in, and blew at the elf as hard as I could. Unfortunately, that was only hard enough to send him stumbling backwards a few feet. There wasn't enough _wind_ down here, that was the problem. "Fucking Durnan and his fucking cut-rate weaponry!" I shouted. "And fuck Undermountain and its terrible ventilation!"

I heard a dry, tinny _ahem_. "How about now?" Enserric asked. Then: "He is coming back, by the way."

"I know!" The drow was approaching me slowly with a cat-and-mouse grin, probably expecting me to fall back on magic or run, either of which would be to his advantage. Desperate, I threw my broken quarterstaff at his face. He leaned to one side and watched the pieces fly with apparent amusement, and while he was still entertaining himself I leaned back, kicked up, and planted my boot into his groin.

The drow crumpled, emitting a faint, high-pitched keening sound. That didn't give me much satisfaction, though. My opponent may have been temporarily out of commission, but there were plenty more where he'd come from and at this point I had no weapon. That wouldn't have been a problem if I'd had open sky to call lightning from, but I didn't even have _that_.

"Hah!" Enserric crowed. "Right in the grapes! Well done!" It pulsed eagerly. "How about now? Will you pick me up _now_?"

I gave in. I needed a weapon and I needed to turn the tide somehow. "Shut up!" I growled, and reached out with both hands for the greatsword's hilt.

Enserric swung free, surprisingly light in my hands – I'd expected it to be heavier than Silent Partner, but if it was, it was only by a few ounces. I backed away quickly, then stopped, gasping. A cold tingle washed through me. It was like stepping into a freezer, and I felt it travel up from my hands to my arms and into the base of my skull, making my teeth chatter. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

The sparkles in the sword lit up like fireflies. "A-ha!" it shouted. "At last! Oh, it feels so good to finally shake off that dust!" Red swirled in black. "Now, let's go kill something!"

I hefted the sword experimentally. The balance was a little strange, although not as different from a quarterstaff as I'd expected - it was kind of like holding Silent Partner in an end grip instead of a center grip, that was all, and it was shorter than I was used to. I tried to remember how I'd seen Kelavir and Magda hold their swords, and adjusted my grip accordingly and the sword seemed to settle more comfortably into hands, although I still felt like something was missing. Like, say, several years of experience.

In front of me, the king was moving, rising from his throne, and the drow I'd just kicked in the skittles was standing back up and looking seriously pissed off as well as standing slightly lopsided.

It was time to take a gamble, and I was betting that the killer instinct of the animate undead was stronger than their attention span. I stepped forward, summoned up a surge of strength, and kicked the skeleton in the back as hard as I could, sending him toppling towards the drow man.

Bones crashed into flesh and leather. Neither of the gentlemen seemed please by the blind date I'd just arranged for them, but the king in particular seemed really peeved, and just like I'd hoped, as soon as he had another living being in reach he forgot all about me.

The drow and the skeleton went down together, fighting.

I didn't wait around to see how the rest of the date went. I ran. "This is crazy," I panted, clutching my last-ditch weapon desperately. "I don't even know how-"

"Not important!" Enserric cried gaily. "Watch out to your right!" The sword heaved in my hands, so hard that it swung _me_ around in mid-step _._ I held on for dear life as it swept over the head of a drow, just missing as I stumbled. "Blast!" the sword shouted. "All right, let's try a downswing this time!" Without waiting for me to respond, the sword jerked again, yanking my hands into a downward swing. Its edge bit easily through hide and chain despite the weakness of the swing, almost severing the drow's arm from his body, and as the blood started to spurt I just about screamed, because that awful cold feeling was slamming into me again, only now it was more like stepping into an ice cold shower, with a bonus of having tiny needles of ice jammed into the base of my skull.

The drow slid off of the sword with a horrible meaty thump. Enserric seemed to lift a few inches of his own accord. "Excellent work," he said. "My goodness. I had no idea drow blood was so piquant."

I stood, shuddering and trying to catch my breath. My skin was still tingling, though the pain was gone – in fact, it was more than gone. Suddenly, I felt energized, like I'd just power-chugged a latte with extra sugar. "What the hell just hap-"

The sword interrupted with a bloodcurdling scream. "Behind you!" he yelled, and before I'd even gotten my senses back he'd spun me around again.

The skeleton king was coming after me. He was unarmed, but given that I was the one who'd stolen his sword _and_ he'd apparently just torn a drow's throat out with his bare hands, this was no consolation.

"There he is!" Enserric shrieked. "Pull me in and block left!"

Somehow, I managed to scrounge up a memory of Tarn or Mags, I didn't even know who, blocking with their sword. A hand went thereabouts, on the hilt, another on the blade above the crosspiece, where there was that extra grip, and then you braced, blade held in close and upright. Bony fingers scrabbled on the black blade.

"Now push!"

The skeleton staggered backwards, rattling.

"Good. Now, slash hard!"

Blindly, I obeyed, although in my rush I ended up not being able to adjust my grip so it ended up being an awkward, one-handed swing. I couldn't tell whether it was my muscles or Enserric's overenthusiasm driving the sword, but either way it somehow managed to bash through bone, cracking it enough to break apart the king's rib cage.

The king dropped, the lights in its eyes going out.

I didn't bother making sure he was dead – well, re-dead, anyway – but ran behind the nearest throne, this one occupied by an inert little pile of bones that didn't seem to be going anywhere. Once there, I stopped for a panicked look around. No one was immediately after me, probably because complete chaos had taken over the rest of the ballroom. Drow fought skeletons. Skeletons went after drow. The drow weren't hidden any more, the sudden rising of the dead having forced them out of hiding and into the center of the room.

The upside of all that was that none of the drow seemed to be paying much attention to us anymore. The downside was that everybody, human and elf and kobold alike, now appeared to have a skeleton problem.

Mags was trying to fend off a drow and a skeleton at the same time. Deekin was singing scratchily and banging his cymbals. I couldn't tell where he was, and then I saw him – spinning around in circles, for some reason, until he suddenly stopped with one final clash of cymbals. "Huzzah!" he yelled.

Then, suddenly, there were about half a dozen perfectly identical Deekins in the room, springing into existence like scaly mushrooms.

The Deekins all looked at each other. "Deekin?" they squeaked in unison. They looked around the room. "Deekin!" they all yelled happily.

Then, as drow and skeletons both came for them, the Deekins scattered in all directions, screaming at the tops of their little lungs, and suddenly there was a whole new level of pandemonium in the room.

One of the Deekins dashed ahead of a skeleton's sword, running for one of the drow. The drow grinned, raised his crossbow, and shot the kobold – who vanished. The bolt went right through it and shot another drow in the back of the knee, instead. The recipient of the bolt collapsed, spitting words I was probably better off not understanding.

Another Deekin clone hopped up on a throne. "Deekin!" it screamed, or maybe he screamed – I couldn't even tell which one was the real one anymore. With a joyful whoop, the lizard jumped down and charged into a bunch of drow, who scattered in alarm before realizing that their attacker was as insubstantial as air, although not before a couple of them had stumbled backwards into the Vivisectionist, who reacted predictably to this sudden surfeit of victims. The skeleton's dagger flashed. A few more screams were added to the mix.

More Deekins ran around, yelling madly, waving their hands, barreling into drow and skeletons indiscriminately, vanishing as soon as they were struck but not before leading a few more skeletons towards the drow and away from me and Mags.

Hope surged. It looked like Deeks and I had had the same idea. Why not keep going with it? "Mags!" I shouted at the top of my lungs. "Lead them towards the drow!"

Mags snapped a look at me. She didn't answer, but her face set and she began driving the skeleton in front of her back and towards the drow with calculated swings of Stormsplinter. A final kick drove the skeleton into a group of drow, and it fell into them, slashing wildly at any living thing in reach.

All of the drow were occupied. We were free, temporarily. "Get to the door!" I shouted. I saw Mags and Deeks pull away, and I slammed down a wall of wind between them and the melee. The effort of it made me sway. I'd been raising wind right and left from sluggish air. I couldn't keep doing this.

Then the others caught up with me, and we all headed for the door.

We burst through to the other side. Mags looked back. "How do we block it?" she shouted, pointing at the door. "They broke the bloody thing down!"

I sucked in one breath, then another. _One more time,_ I told myself, and packed the cool air into a wall just big enough to block the doorway. The world spun. I blinked hard, trying to force the world to hold still. "Move," I said grimly. "Fast as you can without walking into a trap." It wasn't safe to go running willy-nilly down hallways here, but neither was staying here, so we were going to have to run a little risk.

Our progress was agonizingly slow. We couldn't talk – too much noise. Couldn't go invisible – we couldn't afford to lose sight of each other and get separated. Deekin crept ahead, trying to sniff out traps. I consulted my internal map and compass. South, I thought – we needed to go south and wind a little west, too. If all of the passages on this level of Undermountain were connected, I thought that would bring us close to where we'd started.

We needed a secure, defensible position. That island – there'd been gates and lava. If we could get there and get those gates open and then close them behind us, with any luck that would at least get us a reprieve from these fucking drow.

It was a slim hope, but it was better than nothing. With Sharwyn and Daelan dead, no open sky for me to call on, and my old reliable Silent Partner swapped for a chatty egomaniac sword I didn't even know how to use, we were at a disadvantage. Either Undermountain or the drow would have been bad enough by themselves, in the best of circumstances. In these? I felt like a bug about to get smashed between two bricks.

Eventually, I felt moving air and heat. My heart beat a little faster. _Almost there._

I'd gone a few more steps when I heard a soft click and a sudden exclamation, abruptly cut short.

I turned. Then I froze.

Magda was standing stock still, a drow behind her with a small crossbow primed and aimed under her chin. Her arms had been pinned to her body by a sticky webbing. Her face was coldly furious, and at her feet, a smaller web-wrapped figure writhed, making muffled, high-pitched kobold shrieks of protest.

Cold metal touched the back of my neck. "Would you like to play a game, rivvil?" a smooth, deadly voice breathed in my ear.


	19. Alecto

_A/N: A_ _lecto (Ancient Greek: Ἀληκτώ, English translation: "the implacable or unceasing anger") is one of the Erinyes, or Furies, in Greek mythology. According to Hesiod, she was the daughter of Gaea (Earth) fertilized by the blood spilled from Uranus (Sky) when Cronus (Time) castrated him. Alecto is the Erinyes with the job of castigating the moral crimes…against other people._ \- Wikipedia

* * *

 _Over the beast doomed to the fire  
_ _This is the chant, scatter of wits  
_ _Frenzy and fear, hurting the heart  
_ _Song of the Furies  
_ _Binding brain and blighting blood  
_ _In its stringless melody_

\- Aeschylus, _The Eumenides_

~*~  
Chapter 19: Alecto  
~*~

The smooth voice went on. "The game is this," it said. It was light and beautiful. I couldn't tell if it was male or female. "Move, and your friends die. Speak out of turn, and they die. Make one gesture of a spell, and they die."

I stood very still. More drow were coming out of the shadows. I counted. Fourteen, fifteen…too many. And all of them, oddly, were men. "What do you want?"

The voice laughed. "We want you, rivvil." A hand touched my hair lingeringly. "Or I should say, the Valsharess wants you. I only want to do as the Valsharess wants." At some unseen gesture, two drow men moved forward. They removed Enserric from my hands. I didn't resist. I could count, and even if I couldn't, there was that crossbow at Magda's neck and a few more trained on Deekin. "I cannot see what value a rivvil like you could possibly have to her," the voice went on. "But your image has become quite familiar to us, and her desire for you made clear. I will leave it to her to decide whether to kill you or keep you. Or to-" The voice said something rapid-fire in a language that must have been drow. Soft laughter rippled through the drow, and the speaker continued in a language I could understand. "Either way, you will come with us, and you will come quietly."

I tried to calculate the odds. They weren't good. I stalled for time. Maybe Deekin could sing a song to get us out of this, or maybe some more ogres would run through and trample these assholes. Lightning wasn't an option – even if there was any here to call, the space was too confined and I was as likely to hit my friends as my enemies. "Sorry," I said. "I'm sure the Valsharess throws an amazing party, but my doctor says I have to cut back on the hookers and blow. I'll pass."

There was no signal that I could tell, no word or gesture to give the command, but one of the drow holding Magda did something to the arm he was holding. I heard a pop. Magda spasmed. Her face went stark white. She made a noise low in her throat, the start of a scream just barely held back.

My vision went black and red around the edges. I didn't realize I'd taken a step forward until a hand dragged me back and pressed metal even more firmly against my neck. "That was a warning," my captor said. "While I did not understand your words, _human_ , I understood your tone." The voice said 'human' as if it described something that had just slithered out from under a rock. "The next time you dare speak to me in such a way, we will find another part of her to break." Fingers tangled in my hair and turned my head towards Deekin. "Or perhaps we will play with that smelly little beast of yours. You seem to value it, and they are known to make surprisingly sturdy slaves. Shall we find out how many pieces we can remove from it before it dies?"

I was shaking. Fury and terror wove together in me like the snakes of a medusa's hair. Then, as if to add insult to injury, the crossbow was removed from my neck, leaving me free to run – if I wanted. If not for the fact that they'd hurt my friends if I tried. They knew exactly what they were doing, too, judging by the way they laughed. They were fucking _toying_ with us.

I stiffened as a robed drow man came up, a wand in hand. He did something to it, and suddenly the same sticky webbing was wrapping itself around my wrists and slapping itself across my mouth, leaving my nose free to breathe but sealing my lips shut.

My captor stepped around me. It was a woman, one taller and broader-shouldered than any of the men around us. She had long white hair, elaborately braided, and her eyes were albino-pink. Her face was beautiful, smug, and just begging to be punched. "Just a precaution," she said, gesturing at the webbing across my lips. "I have been told that you are a priestess. We cannot have you calling on your god for spells."

I didn't answer. Even without the webbing effectively gagging me, I didn't think I'd be able to. Anger stole the words right out of my throat. I was blind and dumb with impotent rage, and there was a strange buzzing in my ears.

The drow woman saw it, and smiled. "Come. We have a long descent to make, and one does not keep the Valsharess waiting."

* * *

There was no way to tell time, down there in the dark. Time passed. That was all I knew.

Our captors took us down deeper into Undermountain. They carried the dimmest of lights, just enough to keep their human captives from tripping over their own feet when it got too dark. Other times, glowing lichen or fungus lit our way. Still, it was slow going – the most halting forced march in the history of forced marches, and not only because of the dark. Halaster had set up all kinds of ridiculous puzzles and traps. I spent a lot of my time sitting and waiting for the drow to figure things out, when I wasn't being prodded into walking down what seemed like endless miles of tunnels. Every so often, the echoes seemed to buzz in my ears.

As much as I could, I watched the drow. All of them except for the leader were men, and to a man they handled the woman, their apparent leader, like she was a viper. They kept a healthy distance from her unless she spoke to them, and if they did have to address her, they kept their eyes to the ground and their voices soft and submissive. Although I didn't understand a word of drow, there were times when the woman gave what sounded like an order and punctuated it with a kick or a punch or some other act of random, petty violence, and every time her target just meekly stood there and took it.

We descended. Paved corridors gave way to caves. Stone loomed above me. I began to walk a little hunched, trying to duck a ceiling that really wasn't that close but _felt_ like it might come down on my head at any moment.

That wasn't the worst, though. The worst was when the tunnels got narrow and the ceilings lowered until we could only squeeze through single file and the stone walls pressed in on me like snow. Then it was all I could do to keep from screaming. I couldn't breathe. Nausea choked my throat. Cold sweat covered me. Once or twice, the drow had to push me through because my feet just refused to move. That time, one of the drow, the mage, looked back at me, said something to the drow next to him, and they both laughed. I pictured him dead, with one of those damn stupid crossbow bolts they loved so much sticking out of his eye. It was a pleasant, if temporary, distraction.

Later, when we stopped to rest, the leader, whose name I didn't know but whose face I didn't intend to forget, brought Deekin in front of me and broke his fingers.

The little kobold wasn't Magda. He couldn't keep himself from screaming, and the only thing that kept me from throwing myself at that drow bitch was the certainty that it'd just give her an excuse to do worse.

They took him away again, out of my sight. He looked over his shoulder at me and tried to smile. Tears – of fury, of pain, of fear - turned me blind. The little guy didn't deserve this. I'd gotten him into this. If he hadn't come along with me, this wouldn't have happened, neither to him nor to Magda. I didn't think these drow would hurt me – they were leaving that for the Valsharess – but they sure as hell made it clear that not only did my friends' lives depend on my good behavior, but that they'd gladly hurt my friends just for the sake of reminding me of that fact.

I didn't know what I'd done to piss this Valsharess lady off so much. She seemed to think I was a threat, but I wasn't a threat to anyone. If I'd ever had any doubts about that, my current powerless state was proof aplenty. I couldn't even protect my own friends from her underlings, much less give her any trouble. The best I could do was hold still, wait, and keep my eyes open for a chance to get away – for the drow to be attacked so we could escape in the confusion, for a pit to open up and swallow them, for a portal to appear that we could dive into and hope like hell there weren't more drow on the other side. Something. Anything.

We went down deeper. My thoughts got darker.

I'd screwed up. I should have asked Deeks to turn us all invisible. We might have gotten separated, might have gotten caught, anyway, but maybe not. Or I should have fought harder. Called their bluff. I should have done _something_ differently, not gotten trapped like a mouse.

Screwing up was my strong point, though. I had a long history of it. I was irresponsible and sarcastic and impatient and not particularly smart, and I'd done a lot of self-centered, hurtful things to a lot of people in my life. But I _wanted_ to be someone who made things better instead of worse, and over the past few years I thought I'd finally started to get the hang of it, even if it needed all the help of my god and my friends and Silent Partner as a silent reminder of Harry's perfect heart to keep me on the straight and narrow.

Now? My reminder was gone, stolen by these rat bastards, and with Deekin's scream echoing in my head I was having trouble hearing the voices of my better angels.

To make matters worse, I wasn't the person I once was, a spoiled girl who'd never seen a fight and whose only power lay in money and her family name. Now, the name and the money were gone, replaced by power of a different kind.

And now, I'd fought. I'd bled. I'd killed. I'd died. I was no longer a stranger to violence, and in the dark, my worst demons presented me with ideas that were vicious and blood-soaked.

We stopped again to rest in a corner of a much larger cavern. No idea what time it was. The drow sat me down against a cavern wall. I couldn't see much. They'd put out the lights completely. I rolled my shoulders, trying to get comfortable. My ears were buzzing again, and my mouth and hands were still bound in webbing. I looked at the webbing, and my shoulders shook in black and silent laughter. These drow had bound me. A Windwalker. Hadn't they even bothered to do some opposition research first? If they had, maybe they might have realized that you couldn't catch the wind in a cobweb.

That wasn't the best part, though. The best part was that I couldn't even take advantage of their little oversight, anyway. For one thing, I might be able to get away but that would leave me alone and drow-hunted in Undermountain, without Silent Partner, without real wind, without lightning. My chances of survival under those circumstances were miniscule. For another, even if I could save myself by slipping this stinking drow leash, I had no way to bring Mags and Deekin with me. I didn't want to die, I desperately didn't want to die, but I wouldn't be able to live with the guilt of leaving them behind, either.

So here I was. Stuck.

To make matters worse, that buzzing was back, louder than ever. I blinked and gave a little shake of my head. Weirder still, if I listened to the buzzing closely, it almost sounded like…words?

As I listened, the buzzing took on a tinny quality.

Then, all at once, it coalesced into a voice that sounded kind of like an accountant shouting down a long metal tube.

 _Finally!_ Enserric's voice shouted, right into my brain. _I thought I would never get through to you. Do you have any idea what a mess it is in here?_

I just managed not to jump. Was I the only one hearing this? _Enserric?_ I thought. _Is that you?_

The voice went on, in full Miss Priss mode. _And may I say, I have seen things in your mind that I shall never be able to unsee_ , it huffed. _Exactly how many drugs - and people - did you sample in your misbegotten youth?_

I thought back. _Uh. A few?_

 _Hmph. A few dozen, by the looks of it. Though extensive use of psychoactive substances *would* explain your present level of mental acuity._

I chased the frown away from my face. If I started making faces, one of the drow might see it and realize something was up. _Did you have anything useful to say_ , I formed the words in my head. _Or did you just come here to call me a drug-addled moron and criticize my life choices?_

 _Believe me, my dear wielder_ , Enserric said somewhere inside my head. _I have not yet begun to criticize._

Great. We were captured, my friends were being tortured, and now I was getting insulted by a sword. _Forget it. Important stuff first. Let's assume I'm not just imagining this and you really are talking to me. How the hell are you doing it?_

His response came slowly, as if on some kind of time delay. _I_ _am...not entirely sure, myself,_ he said. _When you touched the sword, some sort of...of link, if you will, formed between us. I think it may be related to the sword's abilities._

 _What abilities?_

Annoyance turned Enserric's voice even primmer. _For a woman with such a cluttered mind, you have a remarkably short memory. I have already explained this._

If I screamed now, would the drow think I was up to something or just write me off as insane? _Fine. Explain it again._

A disgusted sigh echoed through my mind. _Oh, very well,_ Enserric conceded _. If you will recall, I was drawn into this sword when it drained my life force. My weapons lore is somewhat fuzzy, but I believe that this blade is vampiric. That is to say, it transfers life energy from its victim to its owner. In my case, I was able to disrupt the transfer when I was struck by it, thus preserving some part of my consciousness in the blade, but that was most likely due to my superior will and tenacity._

 _Actually, I think your ego was just too big. It clogged the drain._

 _Now, that was just gratuitously insulting._ The sword sounded almost pleased. _Well done._

 _Thanks. So you don't know for sure what the sword you're in actually does?_

The sword's mental voice was tart. _If you will recall, my last wielder was rather devoid of life, making the theory hard to test. No, I cannot be certain, but this is my best guess, and logic suggests that in order for the transfer of energies to occur, a conduit must exist between sword and wielder. I suspect that when you first wielded me, that conduit was established._

 _That's a lot of 'believe's and 'suspect's._

 _I have been in this sword for decades with most of my memories slowly decaying until I can barely even recall my own name. If you want certainty, find a living mage, not the echo of a dead one,_ Enserric retorted _. Regardless, some connection was certainly forged the first time you wielded me. I was able to trace it back to you and use it to communicate, though it took me some time to get through that thick skull of yours._

I ignored that last little dig. This wasn't the time to argue, especially not with a voice in my head. Only crazy people did that, and I wasn't crazy. Probably. _Okay,_ I thought at Enserric _. So why didn't the bond form between you and the drow who took you from me?_

 _You are the first to touch the sword in years_ , he answered _. Certainly the first to touch it since I took up residence within it. Perhaps the bond, once established, must be broken before it can form with another._

 _Broken how?_

 _By the death of the wielder, most likely,_ Enserric answered with a certain cold-blooded nonchalance _. But I would be much obliged if you could avoid that. I would rather not spend the next several centuries underground. A few decades were enough._

 _Yeah, well, I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm outnumbered about twenty to one._

 _Ah. Yes. That is what I wanted to speak to you about, in point of fact._

I felt my teeth grinding. _Spit it out, Enserric._

For once, he complied. _I think we are being followed._

Enserric's words made my heart jump. _What?_ I demanded. _Followed by who? And how do you know?_

 _Whom,_ the sword corrected primly _. And I know because this blade appears to have the ability to sense life energies – logical, when you think of it, as it must be able to detect them in order to drain them. I have sensed several such energy signatures on the periphery of our camp. They appear to be taking some pains to remain undetected. Whether they are friend or foe is beyond me to say, but you may want to prepare yourself, either way._

Without turning my head, I let my eyes roam across the camp. I couldn't see a thing. _Where are you?_

 _Here. No – a little more to the left._ I thought I caught a faint red sparkle. _Yes. There I am._

I marked the direction in my head. _How close are they?_

As if in answer, I heard something land in the middle of the encampment with a glassy tinkle _._

Then it exploded in light like a tiny sun.

Drow screamed. Spots danced in my eyes. I couldn't see. _Not important – don't waste time thinking._ I closed my eyes and flashed down into my power. It was like the eye of a tiny hurricane, a seething little ball of cold wind and fizzing energy. I sank into it and thought of mist, the way Kelavir had taught me – of cool white clouds, of slowly drifting fog, of a fine spring rain and the spray of waves crashing over the bow of a sailing ship, drawing the imaginary sensations around me until they felt almost…real.

I became weightless. My bonds slid to the floor beneath me. I held out an arm. It was white and insubstantial. Then I looked around me, wrapped in a cool, remote calm. The drow who'd been left to guard me was still gaping at the spot where I'd been. All over the camp, drow were fighting drow, which was odd but just fine by me. A short, red-haired figure was moving among the drow, his curved dagger flashing. The sight of him sent a ripple of surprise through me. Tomi was still alive. That was something, at least. But where were Magda and Deekin? I looked – _there._ They had one guard on them, but he'd opted to ignore his guard duties in favor at firing at the newcomers.

I flew, feeling the air move around me in a million minute ways that I hadn't been aware of before.

Flying was easy. Stopping was harder. I overshot my friends before managing to slow down and swirl back. I thought of heavy, substantial things - stone, flesh, bone, the pounding of a ship on the waves. My boots hit the ground behind Magda. The sensations of weight and anger and fear all flooded back. I grabbed the thick webbing that covered my friend and breathed out. "Get off," I said, and the webbing twisted and fell from her as if repelled. Immediately, I turned and did the same for Deekin.

"Thanks, Boss," the kobold said breathlessly. He sang a few quick notes and vanished, although not before I saw him cradling his injured hand against his belly. Anger roiled in me, rising above the fear.

Magda didn't waste any time, either. She reached out with her good hand, grabbed the drow guard by the collar, and bashed her forehead into his. Drow skull met Uthgardt skull. Uthgardt skull won. The guy's eyes rolled up in his head, and he passed out, blood running from his nose. Mags turned away from him, gritted her teeth, and slammed her injured shoulder into the wall with a scream. The joint popped back into place with a horrible noise, and she turned back to me, gulping air. "Stormsplinter," she panted. Sweat beaded on her forehead. Her face was chalk white except for two spots of red on her cheeks. "Where?"

The sight of her in that state wound my anger up another notch or two. "Don't know." In the darkness, I'd lost sight of the drow carrying our stuff. If I had to guess, though, it was in the same place as Enserric. I scanned the crowd between where we stood and the black blade lay, keeping my back to the wall. Drow fought drow. A drow woman with long, loose hair spun, wielding a short sword and a dagger that both trailed sparks. As I watched, her dagger ended up in one of her opponents' guts and the sword swept across her other opponent's throat. Another newcomer, a short-haired woman, was firing arrows at faces I recognized, a robed man I didn't recognize was chanting a spell, and Tomi was dancing out of the way out of the drow he'd just hamstrung.

A strident metallic voice cut across the chaos. "Over here!" Enserric screamed. "Pick me up, you witless woman! If you wait any longer we'll miss all the fun!"

That sword had a deranged idea of fun. My eyes scanned the crowd, looking for a way through.

Instead, they fell on _her_ , that sadistic albino-eyed bitch. She had a wand in one hand and a longsword in the other, because apparently drow felt uncomfortable unless they were wielding at least two weapons at the same time. Her eyes fell on me at the same time as mine fell on her. She smiled and raised her wand, taking careful aim.

I raised my left hand and whipped the air into a shield as smooth as glass. Green light broke across it, scattering. It barely registered. Something inside me had snapped, the way it had once, a long time ago, with Heurodis. Rage had me by the throat. I forgot about Enserric, forgot about the rest of the fight. I advanced, fingers flexing like talons, Deekin's scream playing over and over in my head.

I saw the bitch's eyes widen as her spell died on my shield. She looked surprised. Maybe she should have asked her sources for more details about me before she ripped a warrior's shoulder out of its socket. Maybe she should've thought things through a little before she broke a bard's fingers. Maybe she shouldn't have stripped all meaning from my friends' pain by turning it into nothing but a tool to hurt me. Maybe she shouldn't have _toyed_ with me.

The drow woman began chanting and making motions with her fingers. When I was halfway to her, she released the spell.

I snapped my right hand up and raised another shield. The spell splattered off of it. I didn't know what it was. Didn't care. I wanted to _end_ her. I wanted to make sure that she'd never hurt anybody ever again.

The bitch went for her sword as I closed on her. I threw a gust of air at her with my left hand. She staggered. Then I was on her. I stepped into her reach and grabbed the wrist of her sword arm in my left hand. I blinked. My vision shifted. I saw muscle and tendon and delicate white bones, and with a breath I called up the power Shaundakul had given me all that long time ago, high on the mountaintop.

Bones cracked. The bitch screamed. Her sword fell to the ground with a clatter, dropped from shattered fingers. _That was for Deekin._

I stepped closer, still flying high on that bitter fury. My right hand touched her shoulder. I called again. Power boiled up and tore the ball of her shoulder from its socket. Flesh distorted. Tendons snapped. She screamed again. I felt a surge of vicious satisfaction. _And that was for Magda._

The drow woman was on her knees. "Please," she said hoarsely. "Mercy."

I stooped, grabbed her by the throat, and hauled her up. "No," I said, and with spectral fingers I tore every blood vessel in her neck wide open.

I watched the life go out of her. It went quickly. Then I opened up my hands and let the body drop. The corpse thumped to the cavern floor.

Slowly, slowly, the rage receded.

I stared down at the corpse I'd made of the drow woman. That cruel face was finally still, the sneer wiped off of it for good. I didn't know how to feel about that. I thought I should feel something, but if I felt anything, it was hollowed out and…strange.

Voices reached me, faintly. "Well, I'll be a nekkid monkey's uncle," someone said.

A gentle hand touched my leg. "Er, Boss? You okay?"

I managed to turn my head to the side and down. Deekin was standing next to me, his snout wrinkled up in concern. I groped for an answer. I couldn't seem to find one.

Someone cleared his throat. "If you're bloody well done murderin' the hells out o' folk, lady Blumenthal," it said. "There's somebody here who'd like to meet ya. In this life. Preferably."

I looked up. Tomi Undergallows was standing with one foot on a dead drow's chest, smirking. Next to him…

I saw black skin, white hair, eyes so dark they were almost black. Reflexively, I slammed a wall of wind down between us. "Great," I snarled. "Another drow. Who the hell are you?"


	20. Becoming

_it's a part of me  
_ _it's inside of me  
_ _i'm stuck in this dream  
_ _it's changing me  
_ _i am becoming_

\- Nine Inch Nails, "The Becoming"

~*~  
Chapter 20: Becoming  
~*~

The drow woman held up her empty hands and spoke slowly and carefully, the way someone might speak to a wild animal. "My name is Nathyrra," she said, her voice cool and musical and measured. "We mean you no harm." Two other drow stood behind her – a robed man and a short-haired woman with a horn shortbow in her hand. They didn't speak.

Without taking my eyes off of the living drow, I gestured at the corpses around us. "You don't seem all that harmless."

Nathyrra barely glanced at the bodies. "I understand your suspicion, and I applaud your caution. But not all drow mean you harm."

"Really?" My laugh was short, harsh, and not at all amused. "Pull the other one, then, because it seems like the word's been going around that the Valsharess has a yen for that sweet Blumenthal plasma."

The drow woman's smooth forehead furrowed almost imperceptibly. "A...yen?" she repeated blankly. "I am sorry. My surface Common is poor. And…pull the other what?"

I paused and retuned my brain to Radio Toril. Resolutely, I looked away from the corpse of the albino-eyed woman. I couldn't think about that right now. I had to keep myself together until…well, until such time as falling to pieces wouldn't get me and everyone around me killed. "Never mind," I said. I pulled on my talking-to-the-press face. "So, for the sake of argument, let's say you're not here to kill us. Why are you here?"

Nathyrra's posture relaxed slightly. For a moment, I got the impression that she was almost as nervous about talking to me as I was about talking to her. Or she was just a really good actress. "It seems that you are already familiar with the Valsharess," she said. "Good. I will say that there are some drow in Undermountain who oppose her, and will do anything to break her power. I belong to that group."

Tomi piped up. "They're rebels, if you can believe it," he said. He jerked his thumb at Nathyrra. "Just about ran into her up above. I was shadowin' you, and so was she-"

Magda broke in incredulously. She was standing to one side, holding her injured arm. "You were _shadowing_ us?"

"Aye, that I was. When I heard that godsawful ruckus, I…well, I didn't come runnin' to see what was up, because that would have been sheer bloody idiocy, but I did find a hidey-hole and wait to see what came by after. Imagine ol'Grin's surprise when he saw you lot bein' carted away by a whole pack o' drow."

The Uthgardt's face went tight. "And you did not think to lend us aid?"

Tomi snorted. "'Course I thought of it, and good for you I didn't actually _do_ it, 'cause then we'd all of us be caught and on our way to the slave pens. But I did follow you, quiet-like, thinkin' maybe I could spring ya if these bastards ever let their guard down." He nodded at Nathyrra, a grin of reluctant admiration playing around his lips. "Then this one comes out of the shadows like a bloody wraith and asks me why I'm followin' you, and I figure what the hells, I've outlived my usefulness to this world anyway, so I take a gamble and tell her. Lo and behold, it turns out she was a mite worried about you, too. Seems these rebel drow think you're some kind o' legend." He laughed. "No accountin' for taste, I suppose. So we banded together and plotted this lovely little ambush to turn the tables on your ambushers." He spread his hands. "And here we are."

Another faint furrow of concentration had appeared on Nathyrra's forehead as the halfling spoke. Once he'd finished, her face cleared, and she nodded. "That is a reasonable summary, I think," she concurred. "I have been looking for you because I know that you are also an enemy of the Valsharess, and among the drow, we have a saying: the enemy of my enemy is my ally."

Deekin's head cocked like a bird's. "Ally? Not friend?"

"Ah…no," Nathyrra said delicately. "The drow tongue does have a word for friend, but it is mostly used in irony."

"What, drow don't have friends?"

Nathyrra pursed her lips. "That is a complicated question."

"No, it isn't," Deekin argued. "Maybe the answer be complicated, but the question be real simple."

The drow woman's face was starting to take on the kind of expression that was common on the faces of people who'd just met Deekin – a mix of disbelief, confusion, and rapidly growing annoyance. "Nevertheless, now is not the time for the answer." She turned back to me. "We are not safe here. With your consent, we will escort you back to our camp. We will heal any wounds you have, and I will explain more in depth about the Valsharess and our reasons for contacting you."

On the one hand, I trusted this drow as far as I could throw her. On the other hand, she hadn't killed Tomi. On the _other_ other hand, that could all be part of an elaborate ploy to get us to trust her. On the _other_ other other hand, it had already been made painfully clear that we weren't qualified to deal with Undermountain and invading drow by ourselves. There were only three of us, and my abilities were half-crippled by all that stone overhead. I was starting to learn why Shaundakul had said that there were some places where the wind didn't reach. Pity I seemed to be stuck in one of those places. I wasn't the only one, though, and this wasn't my decision alone. I looked at Magda. "Mags? What do you think?"

My friend frowned and looked down. "I trust elves little and drow less. But…" She trailed off. If I had to guess, she didn't want to admit that we needed the help. Not in front of the drow, and maybe not at all. But Mags wasn't dumb.

I nodded. "Deeks? How about you?"

The kobold gave Nathyrra a wary glance. "She be drow. Deekin never heard any stories about _nice_ drow. But if they knows about Halaster and this Vels…Val…drow lady who trying to kill you, maybe it worth talking. If we watches them reeaaal close."

"Fine." I turned back to Nathyrra. "We can talk. But no funny business."

Nathyrra's expression relaxed a little further. "I assure you," she said, straight-faced. "I am never funny." She nodded at the woman standing next to her. "This is Quarra, our chief scout." The woman tilted her head and subjected me to a cool stare. "And the wizard is Izoleth." The man glanced at Nathyrra and gave me a brief nod. "They do not speak your tongue, but they are my allies – and will be yours as well, I hope." She held out a hand to me. "Please, follow us. We will take you to safety, and I will tell you all you need to know."

A metallic-sounding throat cleared. "Ahem," it said. "If you are quite finished, would my wielder mind picking me up? I am, if nothing else, used to sitting on much older and rather less _squishy_ corpses."

We all looked. Enserric was flaring red in the hands of a dead drow, and for a moment, I was strongly tempted to leave him right where he was.

Nathyrra lifted her eyebrows at me. "Is that your sword?" she asked, a spark of curiousity lighting her eyes.

I sighed. "So it claims," I said glumly, and trudged over to retrieve the greatsword, averting my eyes from the drow woman's corpse.

That chill washed over me again when my fingers closed around the greatsword's hill, though this time it was more of a cold breeze than a cold shower, and somehow it left my head clearer. As I lifted him, Enserric's black blade glittered brighter than a Vegas showgirl. "Much better," he said. "Now, do try not to lose me again. That was most unpleasant."

"You're telling me," I muttered, and turned to follow Nathyrra and her cohort from the cavern.

I didn't look back. I didn't need to. I had a feeling that what had happened there would be following me for a while.

* * *

For someone who was maybe planning to kill us, Nathyrra was definitely very polite.

The drow woman had her mage friend conjure a light for us humans, and she made a point of announcing each step of our path through the next couple of caverns before we took it, describing distances and landmarks in an apparent attempt to reassure us that everything was on the up-and-up and she had no surprises up her sleeve. That didn't mean that that big crystal outcropping on the left wasn't about to sprout a fresh crop of drow archers in defiance of all of Nathyrra's assurances, but I supposed we'd at least gotten a nice guided tour before they turned us into porcupines.

Eventually, the drow stopped at a side passage. She spoke softly. From the other side, someone answered. There was a soft noise, and then a faint glow began to shine through. Nathyrra nodded, then led us through a short side passage into a smaller cavern, dimly lit by a few strategically placed glowstones. There were just a few drow inside, all of whom looked at us in silent curiosity. A couple of them had hair more silver than white, and none of them were making any obvious threatening gestures.

I risked a glance up. The ceiling was maybe twenty feet up and the space was fully enclosed, with no other exits that I could see. I closed my eyes briefly – _cold, snow, choking_ – and then opened them again. Eyes opened or closed, it didn't really make a difference. Either way, I suddenly had a hard time breathing.

Magda glanced at my face. Her eyes narrowed. She leaned over. "Are you well?" she asked. Undermountain seemed to be teaching her to speak quietly, in a way nothing else had.

I shook my head. Then I nodded. Then I shook my head again. I didn't speak. It felt like all that stone up there had crushed the voice out of me.

A clawed hand crept into mine. "No worries, Boss. We just need to take care of Halaster, then we can go back to the surface. Just hang in there, okay?"

I didn't deserve this. I'd almost gotten them killed, and _had_ gotten them tortured. They shouldn't have been worrying about me, and after what I'd done, they shouldn't have been acting so normally, but now wasn't the time to have that argument. "Okay," I said. My voice was hoarse. I cleared my throat and ventured a look around.

Then I blinked.

There were two spiny, pony-sized lizards in the cave. With saddles. And, when I craned my neck to look up, I saw that there was a third one standing on the ceiling. I blinked a few more times and looked again. Yep. There was definitely a giant lizard on the ceiling. "Uh," I said. "He's not going to fall, is he?"

Nathyrra followed my gaze. My question seemed to startle a smile out of her. "No. Their toes…" She made a helpless gesture, seeming to search for the right word. "They stick."

"Oh. Good."

"Yes. So you need not worry. They only fall if they are dead."

In other words, everything would be hunky dory right up until somebody shot that thing and then we were all going to be squashed to death by an overgrown iguana. "Uh-huh. Good. That's great." Dazed, I trudged over to the side of the cavern and sat, suddenly too tired to worry about falling lizards or the drow around me. They'd kill me or they wouldn't. In the meantime, there were more pressing concerns. I slung my pack into my lap and fished out two healing potions, plus a few packets of dried rations. I wasn't willing to eat the food here if I could help it. The last thing we needed was to ingest some kind of brain-melting drow poison. "Mags. Deeks. C'mere." I uncorked the vials and handed them over, together with the food. "Take this."

Magda took the potion, downed it in one gulp, grimaced, and sank down next to me. "You are very pale, little noble. Are you sure you were not injured?"

 _Pretty sure._ I'd been the one doing most of the injuring. "I'm fine." Savagely, I shoved all of the thoughts of what we'd just done – of what I'd just done - through into some dark corner of my mind and slammed the door. I turned and held a potion out to Deekin. My hand shook slightly. "Deeks."

The kobold accepted the vial, tipped his head back, and poured the blue juice directly into his gullet. "Thanks, Boss," he said once he was done. He crouched next to me. "Well, looks like nobody killed us yet. That be good."

Tomi drew near, stopping a few feet away before crossing his arms over his chest and standing with one shoulder propped against the cave wall. "Aye. No one's more surprised than me to say this, but so far these black-skinned buggers seem to be on the up-and-up."

I looked at him. He didn't looked much different from the way he'd looked when I'd seen him last in the Yawning Portal. More tired, maybe, and a little grubbier, and his cheeky smirk was looking a little strained. "Thanks for coming after us, Tomi," I said. "I owe you."

The cheeky smirk sharpened. "Right, so, we're talking sixty-forty split, then? Seventy-thirty?"

Magda hmph'ed. "Down, little man. There are four of us here. Your share is twenty-five."

"Forty."

"Thirty."

"Thirty-five.

"Thirty, but Magda does not tear your arms off and beat you with them. Deal?"

Tomi rubbed his chin. "Deal," he said. His smirk faded. "The shares shoulda been sixths, though. I knew about Sharwyn – she went down in the first ambush, right before the rest of us scattered and ran for our bloody lives. Didn't know about Daelan. Poor sod. What got 'im?"

I grimaced. "Mirrors."

"No lie?" Tomi laughed shortly. "Well, if anything could kill a half-orc, I suppose it'd be lookin' in a mirror."

I had to throw an arm across Magda to keep her from jumping to her feet. "I take back what I said about not beating you to death with your own limbs, little man," she growled, her cheeks flushed. "He was a warrior of the Uthgardt, and twice the man you will ever be."

I pushed her down. What little air was in the room seemed to rush into my voice, making it come out like a thunderclap and far louder than I'd meant it to. "Stop," I said. "You can beat the shit out of him when we're safely out of here, but now's not the time."

A forbidding rumble was coming from the Uthgardt's throat, but grudgingly, she sat back. "Bloody hero of bloody Neverwinter, my arse," she muttered.

Deekin looked up from his cymbals, which he was busily polishing with a scrap of cloth. "Wow! That's right. Deekin almost forgot. He be surrounded by heroes today."

Tomi gave the kobold a wary glance. "I only see one hero here. And that's just because you wrote a godsawful book callin' her one."

The kobold grinned. "Oh, no," he said. He looked at one of his cymbals critically and gave one spot in particular a little extra elbow grease. "There be at least two. Deekin hear the Undergallows be a hero, just like Boss."

The halfling's expression seemed to go into lockdown. "I'm not."

"Wow. And you even be cranky about it, just like Boss. That something they teach you in hero school?"

Tomi Undergallows had the face of someone who laughed a lot, or used to. Now, his eyes were dark and he wasn't even close to laughing. "If you know that story, lizard, then you know I ain't the hero of it."

"No." Deekin propped his chin on his good hand and studied the halfling thoughtfully. "That be the famous halfling paladin, Cora Amberleaf. That be her name, right? Nasher tried to hush it up, but some people still talk about it. They say she the one who saved Neverwinter from the plague."

Tomi's face was closed. "You've done your reading."

Deekin shrugged. "It be Deekin's job." He looked up at Tomi eagerly. "So. What was she like?"

The halfling's response took so long, I thought he might not have heard the question. "Perfect," he said at last. Then he turned and walked to the other side of the cavern.

Deekin made as if to follow him. I put a hand on the kobold's shoulder and pushed him back down. "Don't," I said wearily.

The kobold looked back at me. "What?"

"Don't," I repeated. The details would take too long to explain, and I wasn't even sure of most of them. I just knew, from what Linu and Sharwyn had told me before and from what Tomi's face was telling me now, that pushing the halfling on this subject wasn't a good idea. "Please."

Deekin sighed. "Oh, all right," he grumbled, and settled down again.

I watched Tomi go. I wondered what had happened to this perfect woman of his. Probably nothing good. Best case, she'd dumped him. Worst case, she was dead. Super worst case, she was dead and he was somehow responsible for it.

In any case, I was going to have to find some glue to keep Deekin's mouth shut if those two were going to spend any amount of time around each other. Also, I was going to have to glue Tomi's mouth shut if he and Magda were going to spend any amount of time together. Maybe it'd be easier to just glue all our mouths shut and communicate by sign language, but even then I could think of a few hand gestures that would only escalate the situation.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Nathyrra approaching. She had a way of moving that was a little circuitous, like she had an aversion to coming at anything head-on and was more comfortable with sidling. Something about her posture gave me the sense that she was either ready to run or ready to fight, and her dark face was so inscrutable that I couldn't figure out which one it was.

Nathyrra reached us and gave a slight bow, barely more than a nod. "The camp is secure. We may speak, if you are willing." She frowned slightly. "Unless you are in need of rest? You must be tired. We can delay our talk a short time, if you wish to rest. Do you have blankets? Food? We travel light, but we will gladly share what we have."

The conflict between my mistrust of the drow and her seemingly genuine hostessly fussing was starting to give me a migraine. "It can wait," I said. "Unless you two-" Mags and Deeks both shook their heads. "Okay. Rest can wait. What's the story?" I saw the linguistic confusion rising on the drow's face and moved to head it off. "I mean, what can you tell me about the Valsharess?"

Nathyrra nodded and sat, tucking her legs underneath her and adjusting her sword and dagger in their scabbards at her hip. "The Valsharess emerged as a power quite recently," she explained. "In our tongue, valsharess means 'queen'. Drow society is traditionally ruled by the Matron Mothers of the great Houses, and the Valsharess was once Matron Mother of a minor House, with more ambition than power."

The woman I'd seen in my dream had been many things, but weak hadn't been one of them. She'd had her people thoroughly cowed. "So what happened to change that?"

Nathyrra frowned. "That is unclear, but some months ago, the Valsharess gained power to match her ambition. Her aim is to bring the Underdark under her rule, and once that is done, she means to turn her attention to the surface, by way of Undermountain. Recently, her forces were able to capture Halaster, allowing them free passage through Undermountain. The drow attacking Waterdeep belong to her army."

"So she's a megalomaniac, is what you're saying." Remembering the face of the woman in my dream, I wasn't all that surprised. And if these so-called rebels were in the megalomaniac's way, no wonder they were looking for help wherever they could find it. "So how do I enter into this? I don't know if you noticed, but I don't exactly have an army in my back pocket."

Nathyrra smiled briefly. "No, but I believe you can help us find a way to free Halaster. Once he is freed, the Valsharess will be unable to reach the surface. Your city will be safe."

I made my face bland and my voice conversational. "Yeah, see, there's still something I don't get. You guys seem to know your way around." They were definitely more competent down here than we had been. "Why do you need me in particular?"

Nathyrra hesitated. "Your reputation precedes you," she answered. "Your help will be valuable."

My reputation existed because Deekin had written a book about me, and I didn't think the drow were spending much of their time reading trashy novels from a world that wasn't theirs in a language half of them didn't even speak. There was something here that wasn't being said, and I didn't like it. The Valsharess had somehow been told about me and raised my image so she and her forces knew who to look for. Were these guys in on it? If not, how had they found out about me? Was there a bug in the scrying system, and now there were lots of little pictures of me suddenly popping up in scrying pools all over the Underdark, fooling half the drow population into thinking I was special? Seemed pretty unlikely, which brought me right back to where I started: how had these guys found out about me?

I studied the drow woman, trying to find clues in her face. It wasn't easy. With her onyx black skin, her alien eyes, and the dim lighting, I could barely make out her expression at all, much less read it. "So how does freeing Halaster help you?" I asked, abruptly changing tack. If I couldn't pry a clear answer out of this woman, maybe I could startle it out of her. "The Valsharess is using Undermountain to attack the surface. She doesn't need it to attack the Underdark, does she?"

"No, but the resources of Undermountain are considerable, and as long as the Valsharess controls Halaster, she controls those resources," Nathyrra replied. "As well, bear in mind that Waterdeep is a rich and powerful city. If she holds it, she will be able to use its riches against us."

I mulled that over. That seemed reasonable, but one thing still didn't add up, and it was the same thing as last time: "That still doesn't answer the question of how you know about me."

Nathyrra looked at me speculatively. "If you do not object, I shall answer your question with a question. Do you believe in fate?"

I laughed. "No," I said. "I don't believe in fate. Or in prophecy. Or visions. As for the gods, I trust Shaundakul because he's earned my trust, and as far as I'm concerned the rest of the gods can go hang. Sorry."

Nathyrra looked at me a moment longer. Then, suddenly, she chuckled.

I frowned at her suspiciously. "What's so funny?"

The drow woman shook her head. "You remind me of someone else, that is all," she answered. She tilted her head and studied me in that sidelong way she had. "You are a very mistrustful female," she observed.

"The word you're looking for is 'cynical'. And yeah. I am."

Nathyrra nodded. Strangely, she seemed pleased. "That is good. When dealing with most denizens of the Underdark, only a fool gives trust lightly." She drew in a breath. "And that is why I cannot answer that question," she added. "We know _of_ you and we bear you no ill will, I swear, but we do not yet know you. Until we do, there are things I cannot reveal. To do so would be to compromise my people's safety, which I will not do. I am sorry."

My eyes searched the woman's face, but it was too dark and alien to me and I couldn't really tell whether she was telling the truth or not. "That sort of puts us at an impasse, doesn't it? You're asking me to commit myself to your cause on incomplete information."

Nathyrra cocked her head. "True. But we are inviting you to join our cause on incomplete information. Which of us is taking the larger risk?"

Briefly, I weighed the benefits of lying versus honesty. I could act mysterious and let her think I was some kind of badass. Or I could be honest and say I was just a bumbling former rich girl and current priestess who'd survived so far on dumb luck and sheer orneriness. If I let her think I was a badass, I might be able to get her to hesitate before moving against me. On the other hand, if she thought I was a danger to her, she probably would restrict the amount of information she shared with me – and since I wasn't actually a badass, that would effectively leave me without answers at all. The end calculation came down on honesty. "You have us outnumbered. I'd say I'm the one taking the bigger risk."

It was Nathyrra's turn to search my face for some hints to the truth. "If you did have the intent and capability to destroy us, you would hardly announce it."

I had to fight to keep my face still. I'd thought that politics back home was murky. Evidently it had been nothing next to drow politics. It took a lot of paranoia to think a statement of weakness might just be a decoy designed to get you to let down your guard.

Deekin piped up. "How did the bad drow lady capture Halaster?" he asked. "He not exactly easy to catch."

Nathyrra hesitated. "The details are unknown to us. We believe, however, that whatever has fueled her recent rise has also given her the power to entrap the archmage."

So the lady with the whip had found something that had catapulted her from the bottom of the totem pole to the top, where she had enough power to control a man whose name was enough to make half the Sword Coast piss their pants, and for some reason she'd decided that little old Rebecca, sitting down near the bottom of the pole, was a threat to her. Were all drow this crazy, or just these ones? "Fine," I said. "Assuming we agree to help you free Halaster – and I'm not saying we are – do you know where he is and how to get to him?"

Nathyrra nodded. "Yes. He is guarded by the Valsharess' forces, but our scouts may have found a way to skirt their defenses. Then it shall simply be a matter of locating Halaster, killing the drow who guard him, and destroying whatever spell or artifact restrains him."

I stared at her. Then, as if drawn there with a winch, my eyes went down to meet Deekin's.

The kobold met my gaze. "You know, Boss, if we saves Waterdeep, Deekin gonna have a best-selling sequel. You know what that means?"

"What?"

"Even more money than last time." The kobold's eyes brightened. He rubbed his hands together. Scales hissed drily. "Maybe Deekin finally buy that enchanted crossbow he always wanted."

Magda shifted. "Do you trust them?" she asked me bluntly.

I glanced at Nathyrra. "No. But, like the lady said, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I think we can work together. For now." I didn't like it, but if it was foolish to trust, it was also foolish to turn down a potential helping hand when your back was against the wall. I just hoped that hand wouldn't end up driving a knife into my back when all was said and done.

Nathyrra's smile was sudden and, for once, easy to read. She looked relieved. "Thank you," she said. She stood, adjusting her swords again. "I know that you must be tired. You are welcome to rest here. We cannot linger too long, but I think we can take some time for you to regain your strength." She bowed in a businesslike way. "I will wake you when it is time to move."

When she was gone, or at least out of hearing, I mentally whipped myself into speaking. "I'm sorry. You two shouldn't even be here. It's my fault you're caught up in this."

Deekin gave me a long look. "Oh, don't _even_ , Boss," he said. "Deekin knew Undermountain was dangerous and wanted to go anyway. For his epic tale, remember? That be why he came to the Yawning Portal in the first place."

I swallowed. "Yeah, but-"

The kobold cut me off. "It not always be all about you, Boss," he said bluntly. He waved his injured hand. It was already moving better. "Don't worry about it. Deekin a grown kobold. He makes his own decisions. And he still be alive, so it all gravy."

Magda was nodding. "Yes. And I will thank you not to insult my judgement by taking responsibility for my decisions. I knew the risks when I chose to be here." She punched my shoulder. "Stop being such a bloody martyr, woman. It does not suit you."

I flushed, but didn't argue. What was the point? I knew who was to blame for this, and it wasn't them.

Mags was studying me thoughtfully. "What you do need, however, is a lesson."

I blinked. "What lesson?"

The Uthgardt nodded at Enserric. "I saw how you fought with that thing. Good that you survived, and somehow you seem to know the basics of handling a two-hander – but you were sloppy. A ten year old child in my clan would fight better. It would embarrass me to be seen with you. If we are to survive, you must learn how to use that annoyingly chatty sword of yours." She slapped her thighs and stood, rolling her shoulders experimentally. "And I am feeling recovered and need to get my blood pumping again. Come." She moved a little out from the wall.

I goggled at her. "You're seriously suggesting we spar now?"

"Yes." My friend's ice blue eyes were shrewd. She pointed a finger at me. "No arguing, now, and no brooding. You will brood yourself right into the Abyss if I let you." She took Stormsplinter out of its sheath and nodded to Enserric. "Pick it up. Good. Now. We will start with the grip. That sword of yours has a good long hilt. That will be to your benefit. The grip and balance will not be too dissimilar from that which you are used to with your staff. Of course, it is not too similar either, and there are many different ways to hold hilt and blade, depending on the nature of your strike." The Uthgardt moved my hands on Enserric's hilt, tucking fingers here and tugging them there. "Here is the first hand stance. This will be what you use the most, for slashing. Then, for stabbing, there is the second…"

* * *

It was later. The lights had been reduced to one glowstone. Deekin and Magda were asleep. Neither of them seemed interested in getting too close to the drow or far away from each other. As a result, Magda was drooling on my shoulder and my leg had fallen asleep because there was a kobold sprawled across it.

Enserric sat at my side. He'd seemed pleased to be used, and the sparring had been a decent distraction, although disheartening. I knew how to use a quarterstaff. I was no champion staff fighter, but I could usually hold my own with it, or at least buy myself enough time to run or call a storm down on my enemies' heads. An hour with Mags had shown me how much I didn't know about handling a greatsword.

The sparring had been a decent distraction, but now I sat, no distractions, just thoughts I could no longer shove away, and I was feeling mighty strange.

I sat, blindly turning Kelavir's little polished piece of fluorspar over in my fingers, a little piece of the surface in dark so thick I could hardly see at all. I felt marked. Dirty. It was a wonder no one else seemed to notice anything different about me. Hadn't they seen? Hadn't they heard?

I remembered killing J'Nah, the sorceress who'd been in cahoots with Tymofarrar to steal the mythallar from Drogan. She was the first person I'd killed. How long ago had it been? Close to three years, I thought. Strange, but it felt like much longer than that.

J'Nah had cried mercy, too. I hadn't wanted to kill her. I hadn't even meant to kill her, but her plea had been fake and she'd taken advantage of my hesitation to stab me in the leg, and I'd lashed out in panic and pain before I even knew what I was doing. Xanos had had to carry me out of her hideout, afterwards. I'd been a wreck.

Now, I wasn't a wreck. Just numb. The drow woman had cried mercy. I hadn't panicked. I'd known exactly what I was doing. I'd heard her plea for mercy, I'd looked her in the eyes, and I'd murdered her anyway.

The worst part wasn't that I'd ended another life so…deliberately. The worst part wasn't even that I'd gotten so consumed with anger that murder became an option, although that was pretty awful.

The worst part was that if I was given the chance to hit rewind and erase, I suspected I might end up hitting replay instead.

Realistically, I'd had no choice but to kill her. She'd made the stakes clear: us or her. But I _had_ had a choice about _how_ to kill her, and I'd made a bloodier choice than I'd ever imagined myself capable of making.

It had never been this bad in my old life. I'd had a vindictive streak sometimes, when my temper flared, but not like this. Then again, in my old life, I hadn't had this kind of power.

Then that woman had hurt me. She'd hurt my friends. I hadn't just wanted to kill her. I'd wanted to _hurt_ her the way she'd hurt others, and I had the power to do it, so I did it.

I still had that power. Shaundakul's gift was still nestled right next to my heart, filling me with that quiet hum of energy that I hardly noticed anymore unless I deliberately focused on it. It hadn't gone anywhere. I couldn't say why, and I was afraid to ask. After what I'd done with his power, he'd be well within his rights to take it away from me, and yet there it was.

A faint glow painted the immediate area red. Enserric didn't say anything, and I was glad. That great black blade didn't belong there by my side. Silent Partner did, but it was gone. I'd lost it, and now I was starting to wonder whether I'd lost the better part of me along with it.

My friends slept, the long watch stretched on, and I stared into the shadows surrounding me, wondering just what kind of person I was becoming.


	21. Mad

_A/N: Paging reviewer SadnessAndSorrow to say: Here's a little reward for your patience. ;) Enjoy!_

 _Also, I was listening to Indiana Jones soundtracks the entire time I wrote this. You can probably blame those for the invisible bridge idea._

 _Also also, so you know that this is actually a thing and I didn't make it up, from the Windwalker class description: "Soft Fall: A windwalker always receives some support from the winds, as if under the protection of feather fall spell."_

* * *

 _"_ _But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.  
_ _"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."  
_ _"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.  
_ _"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."_

\- Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_

~*~  
Chapter 21: Mad  
~*~

We looked out over the cavern from a high, concealed ledge. Some kind of lichen grew all over the walls here and cast a pale light, just bright enough to see movement below - and below, drow swarmed like ants. There was no telling how many there were. I stopped counting at 'lots more than us'.

The other drow, the ones who were supposedly on our side, were on the ledge with us. They were easy to count, because there were only six of them, plus the three lizards. Quarra was mounted on one of the lizards, hooked into the harness by a complicated-looking set of straps and buckles. Two more drow were locked onto the other mounts the same way, armed to the teeth with crossbows and strange, hooked pikes.

This crew was different from the last, in a lot of little ways. For one, if they laughed at all, it didn't seem cruel, but more like the normal idle joking among comrades. For another, the men didn't seem afraid of the women. Nobody here looked at the floor, nobody shouted orders or insults, nobody tried to kill anybody else. I wasn't sure whether to be relieved, or to be afraid that the apparent sanity of this bunch was just a lid covering an even deeper well of psychopathy.

Nathyrra appeared next to me, belly-crawling to the edge of the ledge. Somehow, she did it without making any noise. That shouldn't have been possible. She had armor that should have creaked and scraped against the stone, weapons that should have clanked. And yet, somehow, she didn't make a single sound. "Do you see there?" she breathed, pointing. Her breath tickled my ear.

I forced myself to stay still and not twitch away. Being so close to a drow was making me seriously uncomfortable. It wasn't just the itching sensation between my shoulder blades as I waited for a knife to slip between them, although that was part of it. It was also her incredible _otherness_.

These drow seemed as beautiful and sleek and perfect as surface elves, except that they were also much more alien, with their pitch black skin and bone white hair and eyes that ranged from insect black to blood red to pale silver. I'd never felt so clumsy and frizzy-haired and boring. So… _human_. Not to mention so badly in need of a bath.

Trying to push my discomfort aside, I looked down, following Nathyrra's pointing finger. There was a rocky outcropping near the enemy camp, almost like a sheer-sided stalagmite with the top chopped off. A big wooden contraption occupied most of the top of it. "It's a siege weapon," I said. "Of some kind."

Nathyrra nodded. "A ballista," she whispered. "Yes." Her black eyes moved - scanning, calculating. "Foolish. I see the necessity of placing the ballista high, for range and defensibility. But they have only two guards on it. If a small force can sneak past their lines and kill those guards, we can rain death down on them with their own ballista. There will be some risk – after our first shots, they will retaliate and attempt to regain the ballista – but it will be better than facing them on open ground."

I was impressed. There was no way I could have come with all of that myself. "You're pretty good at military strategy."

She smiled. "Hardly. I have merely been the recipient of some rather…extensive advice from someone who is." She studied the lay of the land again. "Over there. Do you see? There is a door."

Something loomed in the unlit shadows against the opposite wall, maybe a couple thousand feet away. It could have been a door. Maybe. "You think Halaster's back there?"

"Our scouts believe so. It is rumored to lead to the archmage's private quarters, or at least some portion of them."

Tomi crawled up on my other side. "Wotcha," he said softly. "Who we killin' today?"

"Depends," I whispered. "Say. You think you could sneak up on that ballista?"

Tomi looked. "I'm bloody good at hidin'. But to get there I'd have to climb down a sheer cliff the height of a fair-sized battlement without bein' seen, sneak across a fortified camp, and climb back up another, shorter sheer cliff in plain view o' about, oh, let's say a good fifty drow."

"So you're saying you can't do it."

"No, I'm sayin' it'll be a mite tricky, is all." The halfling sniffed and rubbed at his nose thoughtfully. "That drow wizard there can turn us invisible. Might get me a ways across."

Deekin's head appeared, peering cautiously over the lip of the ledge. "Deekin could try to sing them to sleep. Maybe."

"Don't, kobold. All you'll do is enrage 'em."

On the other side of Nathyrra, Magda shrugged. "Do not look at me for ideas," she muttered. "I am Uthgardt. I do not sneak. I charge."

"You're sneaking now," I pointed out.

"That is because there is an army of drow down there. Uthgardt is not the same thing as stupid."

Nathyrra frowned. "Quarra and her scouts can approach from the ceiling. But the drop from there to the ballista platform is too far for their mounts."

The ballista platform rose smack in the middle of the cavern with the enemy camp arranged on all sides around it. Tomi was right. Climbing it would be tough if not impossible, especially because you'd have to do it in plain sight. Not a big deal if you were quiet and invisible, but if you weren't, things could turn really bad really fast. If I had to guess, that's why they only had two guards on it. When you were high up, could see anyone coming from miles around, and could throw fire at anyone who got close, you didn't really need guards.

I stared at the ballista platform, wracking my brain. We couldn't go down the cliff and across the cavern floor. We'd end up embroiled in hand-to-hand combat on open ground, or just picked off the cliff if they saw us soon enough. That was why Nathyrra's band had led us along this ledge in the first place – it let us sneak up and survey the situation without being seen. But it also left us high up, and while the ledge descended and eventually led down to the floor, we'd still have to cross open ground and make that nasty climb in order to secure the ballista.

No, the ideal situation would be if we had a way from here to the ballista, directly. But that wasn't going to happen unless we asked those guys down there to build us a nice walkway. Or unless we could walk on air like Mister Windy. Or walk on the ceiling and walls like lizards. Or…

Abruptly, my breath caught. I felt my eyes go wide. _What if…_

Carefully, I craned my neck to look at the cave lizards the drow had brought with them. They were standing now, but on the way here, they'd been a hell of a sight. The lizards didn't scurry or crawl over the stone, they _flowed,_ sinuous and soundless, and they made no distinction between the ground and walls and ceiling, slipping smoothly from one to the other as if it was all just one continuous surface to them.

I turned back. My breath came back, only now it was shorter. A crazy idea was forming in my head. I wish it wasn't. It was completely fucking bonkers, and it went a little like this:

I knew how to make walls of wind. I just found air currents and pulled them in and drove them together, so that they were dense enough to deflect arrows or block a path.

Usually, those walls were, well, vertical _walls._ It had never occurred to me to make a wind wall _under_ me _._ Usually, if I was fighting something, I didn't have to worry about the ground attacking me, too.

But really, there was no reason why I couldn't make a wind floor as well as a wall. Was there? They were the same thing, just at different angles. And, if I could make a floor, I could make a bridge, because wasn't a bridge basically just a really long floor?

It was a crazy idea, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it could work. As long as I abandoned all pretense to common sense and self-preservation, anyway.

I found my voice again. "Hey, Tomi?"

The halfling looked at me curiously. "What?"

"How much do you weigh?"

* * *

I stood at the edge of the ledge and looked down. _Well, here goes nothing._

I narrowed my focus to the hum of power in my chest. Air moved against my skin. I stood very still, straining to catch each whisper-light sensation. If I looked hard enough, I thought I could almost see them – faint currents of air, white and swirling, although they could just as easily have been figments of my imagination. They were weak, so weak compared to what they were when they had a chance to grow up under the open sky. I missed the sky. I hoped I'd see it again soon. I couldn't take much more of this damn stone everywhere I looked.

I drew in a couple of breaths. _Focus,_ I thought, and slowly, carefully, began to pull the air in.

I didn't want to make the bridge too wide. The walls I knew how to make could push somebody back or block them from coming through, but being pushed on was a lot different from being stood on. I didn't know how much a wind wall could bear if you stood on it, and I really didn't want my bridge to give out and drop me smack into that drow camp down there.

I pulled the air in, and as carefully as I could, I formed it into a walkway, a couple feet wide and a few feet long. I couldn't really see it, but I could feel the places where power and wind gathered.

I held the air tightly, not with my hands but with some sixth sense in my head and in my heart. It was like reading a far-away sign or straining your ears to hear a faint sound or wracking your brain for a thought right on the edge of memory, a kind of attentive drawn-out tension.

Then, knowing where the bridge was if not knowing exactly _how_ I knew, I stepped out onto empty air.

I didn't fall.

Carefully, I looked down. Empty space yawned under me. I tried not to see it, just let my eyes glide over it and didn't think about it too hard, because if I thought about it I half suspected the whole thing might fall apart and then I'd be in trouble.

Tomi whistled. "Now _that's_ some proper windwalkin'."

Without doing anything as drastic as letting my foot lose contact with the packed air beneath my feet, I took a tiny, shuffling step. Still good. I tried to extend the wall/floor another couple of feet. I felt myself sink slightly downwards. I snapped my focus back, my heart suddenly hammering. "Okay. Is this a good time to tell you I can only manage about…" I squinted and made a guesstimate. "…five feet at a time?"

"Hey, that's impressive. Most women can only manage a good eight, ten inches maximum before they start complainin'."

A snort of involuntary laughter escaped me. My bridge wobbled slightly. I tensed. "Not a good time to be a comedian, Tomi," I said, my voice strained.

Nathyrra stood at the edge of the precipice. "How many can you carry?"

There was a little give in the air under my feet, even now. "Probably just Tomi." Deekin was about as light as the halfling, but his crossbow was noisy and his spell-singing a dead giveaway, whereas Tomi had stalked and killed _drow_ without getting caught.

Nathyrra nodded calmly. "We will wait until you secure the ballista and begin destroying their forces," she said in her cool, even voice. "Once their numbers are diminished, we will close in on the remainder from two sides. I will send up a flare. Look for it. That will tell you that we are moving into position. With luck, the fight may draw our enemies away from the inner chamber, leaving the way clear for us to reach Halaster. No doubt they will maintain a guard on the archmage, but we can hope that it will be reduced."

I had to hope like hell Nathyrra wasn't setting us up. Then again, if this was a trap, it was one that gave us access to the biggest weapon in the room. I spared a glance for Mags and Deeks. They looked back, gravely. They were both armed and ready for a fight – from any quarter, I suspected. I took a deep breath. This wasn't goodbye. I wouldn't let it be. "All right. Time's wasting. How about that spell?"

The wizard, Izoleth, stepped forward at a word in drow from Nathyrra. Gingerly, I came in hand's reach of the ledge. Then, in a few chanted syllables from the wizard, I was gone from sight. With a few more syllables, so was Tomi.

I turned carefully and knelt, helding my cupped hands behind my back. "Up you go, Tomi."

A booted foot kicked me in various places before it found my hands. Weight settled, forcing me to brace, but only for a second before hands went around my shoulders, hanging on. "Rowr," said a voice in my ear. "Hot. I've always wanted to try climbin' atop a nice tall glass o' water like yourself."

I stood as carefully as I'd turned. What was it with halfling men and sexual harassment? This guy was as bad as Torias. "If you annoy me too much, you might break my concentration, and if you do that we might end up falling," I warned.

Arms tightened around my shoulders and legs around my waist. "On second thought, maybe I'll just lie here quietly an' think o' Calimshan."

I took my first nervous step on my bridge of air. "Good call."

Our progress was slow, inching, and painful. I didn't dare move any faster. I couldn't see my own feet and I could barely feel the bridge beneath them. I had to skim each foot forward, then stop, then skim the other foot, then skim, and on for each ginger little step.

Every so often, I had to stop and carefully, carefully gather a little more air and extend the bridge another few feet. And then: skim. Pause. Focus. Skim. Pause.

Another painstaking, painful who-knew-how-many feet later, we were halfway, hovering in midair on a thin span of air, and I was breathing hard. Tomi was light, but the combined effort of carrying him and sustaining the bridge was a doozy.

Another dozen or so feet, and I started to sweat. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Skim, pause, wheeze.

The guards came into clear sight. I felt Tomi shift. "Hold up," he breathed in my ear, barely audible even from that distance. "And don't get offended, eh? I'm not bein' handsy, I just need to get my knives." His hand moved between us, working his throwing knives free of the bandolier over his chest. I barely heard the metal scrape as he eased them out. "All right. Stop when I tap."

I was a few feet away from the edge of the ballista plateau when I felt a light tap on my shoulder. I stopped. There was a moment of quiet tension. Then there was a jerk in the weight on my back, and suddenly a throwing knife was shooting past my ear, humming as it spun.

The knife hit the furthest guard in the throat. He dropped without a sound. I felt another little movement, and before the first drow had finished dropping, another knife flashed past my ear. The second guard dropped the same way, and then the coast was clear and I was stepping onto solid ground and Tomi was jumping from my back, cursing quietly about something. His aim, I thought. I wasn't sure what could possibly be wrong with it. He'd just killed two men in about five seconds, and I was definitely going to be a lot more careful around halflings from now on. _Harmless little curly-haired munchkins, my ass._

I ran for the ballista in a running crouch. We'd made it, but we were visible, and it was only a matter of time before somebody saw us. I looked at the mess of ropes and levers and mysterious metal bits. My heart sank. "How the hell do you work this thing?"

Tomi pushed past me and yanked a lever. The ballista fired. A bolt like a spear shot from it, and then, midair, some spell-enchantment flared and the bolt became a ball of flame that arced down to the camp below. There were shouts, then screams as the fireball hit and exploded.

I dropped to my stomach and risked a peek over the edge. Drow were running. Drow were dying. More were moving, chanting, lunging for weapons.

Metal rattled as Tomi pulled another spear-sized bolt from the pile. The point glowed cherry-red. "That's how you work it," he answered. "Now help me load this before those bloody rotters regroup."

The bolt was surprisingly light, and slotted smoothly into its groove once we figured out where that was. A wheel and pulley system drew the bow back. Tomi yanked the lever again. A second shot went off. "There!" he shouted down at the drow. "Try slaughterin' a bunch o' innocent surfacers now, why don't ya?"

As if in response, a bolt buzzed past, too fast to see. A spell followed it, damned if I knew which one but I didn't want to get in its way. We both dropped to our stomachs. "Looks like they're catchin' on," Tomi observed with a vicious grin. "Catchin' on fire, that is. Let's give 'em another taste, shall we?"

I looked up as Tomi loaded the next bolt. The door to the other chamber was opening. Drow were rushing out. Somebody must have heard the ruckus.

The ballista thudded back again. There were more screams, half-buried under the clatter and crank of Tomi reloading and re-priming the huge weapon.

Something purple rose into the air of the cavern and then unfurled, twinkling like a silent firework. "I think that's the flare," I said. I looked to the door. More drow were coming out. If our folks were supposed to be attacking the camp, that meant they were running the risk of having reinforcements run right up their asses. "Shit. We need to turn this thing, take those guys out. Can we do that?"

"We can," Tomi answered. He threw a few levers and then put his shoulder to the side of the structure . "Help me. I need those strong arms o' yours."

Given our differences in size, he ended up helping _me_ rotate the thing on its platform more than I helped _him_ , but I didn't make an issue of it. "How'd you learn how to work these things, anyway?" I asked.

Tomi grunted. "Aribeth's siege on Neverwinter."

Another shot went off. It tore through a contingent of drow near the door. From this distance, their deaths seemed unreal, a thing glimpsed in a dream. We reloaded. "Didn't think you were there for the siege."

The halfling's face was set as he helped me hoist another bolt into its cradle. "Aye," he said, his voice flat. "I was there."

We fired off another bolt and ducked behind the ballista again.

"Cora could've killed her, woman to woman," Tomi said suddenly. "She didn't." His mouth twisted. "Woman almost never lost hope. She believed everyone deserved a second chance." He laughed. "Even Aribeth, even after all she'd done. So she gave Aribeth to Nasher, expectin' mercy, and Nasher had Aribeth hanged instead." Tomi spat. "And he didn't just hang her, he made a bloody spectacle of it."

The grief was back in his eyes. "What happened to Cora?" I asked, suspecting that I already knew the answer.

The halfling's smile turned bitter as black coffee. "She lost hope." Tomi twisted away to peer around the body of the ballista. "You should go."

I blinked. "What?"

He pointed. "There are too many of 'em. Someone needs to stay here and blast the suckers. Cover the rest o' you while you go free Halaster and let him finish the rest. It's bloody useless to to have two people man this thing when it only needs one, and you don't know how to use it, which means I'm the one to stay and you're the one to go." He smiled at me. "You destroyed a mythal and gutted a medusa sorceress. You can break a drow spell and free an archmage, can't you?"

An arrow flashed towards me, then spun off into the air. "What'll you do?"

"Stay." The halfling huddled behind the siege engine as a flurry of arrows whipped past us. "For once in my miserable life."

I watched the fight. It didn't look good. I couldn't see Mags or Deekin. I hoped they were okay. "Tomi-"

He gritted his teeth. "Just bloody _go,_ " he snapped and yanked back on the ballista's mechanism. Fire exploded overhead. "Now."

I looked up. Drow were everywhere, swarming. Past the door, I saw an eerie, flickering purple-white light.

I looked back at Tomi. He looked back, grief weighing heavy in the lines of his face. "She was a good girl, you know," he said. "I never should have left her, but that's what I do. Things get complicated, and I run."

My heart broke for the millionth time since this whole thing had started. "I'm sorry."

Tomi smiled at me. "Don't be. I ain't runnin' now." He shrugged. "Better late than never, eh?" He made a shooing motion. "Now, run fast, lightning lady. People are countin' on ya."

I held his eyes a moment longer. Then I nodded, shoved myself to my feet, and ran to the edge of the plateau without looking back.

Then, without stopping, I leapt out into the air. I felt myself rise, carried a little ways by my momentum. Then gravity caught me, and I began to fall.

That was the thing, though. As Kelavir Tarn had proved way back in his youth, if Shaundakul decided you weren't going to fall off of a cliff, you weren't going to fall off of a cliff, no matter how hard you tried.

I just hoped the wind still cared, after all I'd done.

 _Catch_ _me if you will, Shaundakul_ , I prayed, and let myself fall.

Halfway to the ground, I felt the wind catch me. My fall slowed. I drifted down, light as a feather, until my feet gently, gently touched the ground.

Relief hit me like a freight train. Apparently the wind still wanted me in one piece. Why, I didn't know, but right then I wasn't going to question it. "Thanks, old man," I murmured under my breath. Then I shook myself and took off running.

I ran past corpses, smoking. A lot were in pieces. I tried not to see them, even as I looked for familiar faces.

There were drow fighting near the door. A bolt buzzed like an angry wasp and one of the drow, one whose face I didn't recognize, dropped with a black-fletched haft suddenly sticking out of his eye.

My head lifted, eyes searching – _there!_ Three pony-sized lizards were flowing down the cavern wall, quick and sticky-footed. Quarra was mounted on the closest one, notching her bow and letting it sing as I watched. Her arrow thudded into an enemy drow's unprotected neck, just beneath his ear. He spun on his own axis, then dropped.

Quarra and one of her scouts slithered down from the wall and circled around me, heading for the doors. The third scout didn't bother with the floor, instead easing her mount towards the lintel and then right over it to the wall on the far side, almost as if climbing over a fence. As she passed me, Quarra lifted her hand briefly to her forehead as if in salute. I couldn't tell if it was meant to be ironic or not. Probably ironic, I concluded.

The doors were heavy, metal, scorched. There was shouting past them, and the sounds of fighting. I ran in. The cavern past was huge, but structured, divided by benchs and vats and screens and all the weird accessories of wizards' lairs. Drow fought drow in little pockets, surging back and forth.

I ducked behind a screen and peeked out. Quarra and her crew streamed past me. One of the lizard-riders leaned a little out of his saddle and swung his curving pike at the nearest enemy like a player in the world's weirdest game of polo. His victim's head flew in a confused jumble of white hair and black skin and scarlet blood.

The other rider was on the ceiling, guiding her mount with her knees while she loosed one shot after another into the scrum below. One of her enemies looked up and shouted. Another raised a crossbow of his own and shot. His bolt struck true. Blood rained down, and the rider's body went slack in her harness. Her crossbow fell from her hand, shattering on the floor.

Quarra saw. Her face twisted. She yelled something, damned if I knew what, but her sentiments were abundantly clear as she dropped her bow, yanked her pike from its place on her lizard's harness, and drove her mount forward into the fray. The lizard's head swiveled, jaws snapping, and Quarra's pike whistled as it spun, bashing heads, ripping throats, severing tendons, jabbing the weak points in the other drows' almost insectile armor.

The only drow not currently fighting was a woman, screaming at an ancient-looking man on the opposite side of the room. The man stood shackled by what looked like lightning, anchored to three stones, and in my head I saw Heurodis again, standing in the center of the mythal stones.

 _Undrentide all over again, and again, and again,_ I thought, and wasn't sure whether to laugh, scream, or cry.

Lightning stabbed past me, taking down a couple more drow. Then the air next to me stirred, and a familiar form materialized – obsidian skin, white hair, black eyes. "We need to destroy those stones," Nathyrra said without preamble. "They seem to be the loci of the spell. Can you destroy them?"

Either she was on my side, or she was damn conniving and had a plot I couldn't fathom, because I hadn't had the slightest idea she was there and she could have killed me before I knew it, if she wanted. Also, I'd be damned if I knew what loci were, but they sounded important so I decided to just go along. "I don't know if I can-"

"Yes, you can," interrupted a familiar tinny voice. "Get me to them."

I held Enserric up and stared at him. "What?"

The sword heaved a sigh. "In case you have not noticed, this sword is not made of any metal alloy. It is blood glass, and the enchantments on it are strong. Get me to those stones, and I may be able to shatter them."

I exchanged glances with Nathyrra. Then I shrugged. A crazy idea was better than no ideas. "All right," I said. "Get us there, Nathyrra."

The drow nodded. Her fingers writhed. The words of a spell, spidery and strange, fell from her lips. She vanished again.

I stared. She hadn't _looked_ like a wizard, what with the swords and leather armor and all. Apparently, looks were deceiving.

In the middle of the chamber, right behind the drow woman who was haranguing the archmage, Nathyrra reappeared. She stood with her back to me, so I couldn't see exactly what she did, but I could see her arm move, first draped over the woman's shoulders like a lover and then drawing back sharply, her dagger spitting blue fire as she drew it across the woman's throat.

Nathyrra stepped back. The woman dropped, clutching at her throat. The edges of the cut were singed, and the blood that poured out between her fingers was smoking. "Your turn, surfacer," my so-called ally said, without looking behind her. "Quickly. I hear more coming."

Enserric was practically quivering in my hands. "Let's go, let's go!" he crowed. "Oh, it shall be a feather in my cap if I save the Blackcloak. And those fools at the academy said I would never amount to anything-"

I gritted my teeth. I missed Silent Partner. It hadn't talked. "You're a _sword,_ you dingbat. You said it yourself. You barely even remember being a mage."

"Well, _yes,_ but it is a matter of principle. A dead and quite disregarded mage saving an archmage. Can't you just _taste_ the irony?"

What had I done to deserve such a mouthy weapon? "Shut the fuck up," I said, and ran for the stones.

When I got there, I drew back and swung, two-handed, twisting with my feet and torso to bring all the strength I had into bear into it and hoping like hell Enserric was right.

The first hit on the first stone opened a crack. The second widened it. The third broke the stone, sending shards scattering and shocks reverberating up my arms. The line of energy holding the archmage to it wavered, then vanished.

"I told you!" Enserric crowed. "Now, on to the next, there's a good girl."

"Call me 'girl' one more time and I'm dropping you into the deepest pit I can find, Enserric!" I shouted back, and swung at the second stone. The explosion of this one sent me back several paces, my ears ringing. I staggered forward again and tried to focus on the last one. _Almost there,_ I thought, and swung.

The backwash from the breaking of the third spell-stone sent me flying backwards as if I'd been kicked by a giant.

I hit a wall. Didn't know which, not that it mattered – they all hurt the same.

I slid down, groaning. Stars danced in front of my eyes.

Voices intruded on my consciousness. They were babbling. Arguing.

Another voice hissed in my ear. "Get up," it said. It had a metallic quality to it. "Come on, gi…wielder. Up you get." Something twitched under my hand. "Mad bloody archmage ten feet away. Get up, please. I do not want to end up without a wielder again."

I tried to sit up. My head spun. "You're a seriously self-interested son of a bitch, you know that?" I wheezed. On the second attempt, I managed to make it upright.

On the fourth try, a hand grabbed my arm. "Up, little noble," Magda said. She hauled on me. "Up, now."

I grabbed onto the Uthgardt's arm like a lifeline. "You're alive," I gasped. "Thank you, Shaundakul."

She grinned at me. Her face was bloody and her braid looked like she'd stuck a knife in a light socket, but she was alive and standing. "Aye, and a rousing little fight it was," she boomed. "Just the thing to get the blood pumping."

I let the crazy Uthgardt haul me up. "That's you. Where's Deeks?"

A voice came at the same time as a set of clawed fingers wrapped around my calf. "Here, Boss! The drow be dead. The archmage killed them. It was pretty cool. Zap, zap, zap!"

"Cool?" I shook my head, trying to clear the spots from my eyes. My gaze focused on Halaster, in his former prison, with Nathyrra standing in front of him.

Nathyrra was half-crouched, recoiling from him with her expression for once fully readable. She looked both disgusted and alarmed. "Archmage," she said. Her hand stretched out cautiously. "Please. I beg of you-"

In a circle of shattered stone, the archmage turned. He had wild hair and wild eyes and the air of somebody so far off the deep end he needed an oxygen tank and a pair of flippers. Weirder still, he had a twin standing right next to him, or a mirror image, or a clone, or something, and as soon as I was upright, both images turned to look at me.

"Well, _you_ don't belong here, that's patently true," one of the Halasters said. His eyes studied me, pale and piercing as a sliver of glass. "Yet you saved me, or tried to, which leaves me to wonder: what to do with you?"

I was missing several pieces of this conversation, including why the fuck there were two Halasters. I'd only signed up to rescue one Halaster. "What in the Hells is going on here? And why are there two of you? And why are you speaking in iambic pentameter or whatever that is?"

The other Halaster blinked. Then he nodded, as if reaching a decision. "What you're lacking in manners, you make up for in nerve." He made a weird gesture at me. "You might even do, so down you go, to give the Valsharess what she deserves."

I stared at him. Then, all at once, something sank into me, like claws gripping the back of my neck. I clapped a hand to the back of my neck, but there was nothing there, and even as I felt for claws they sank deeper still. "What did you just d-" Pain grabbed me by the neck and wouldn't let go, robbing me of words.

Nathyrra grabbed my arm. "He just put a geas on you," I heard her say, her voice coming through the pain as if from through cotton wool. For once, her cool voice was rattled, almost shocked. "A compulsion. I think…I think he has bound you to kill the Valsharess."

One of the Halasters nodded. "Someone must get her, make her pay for her crime. I'd do it myself, but I can't spare the time."

The other agreed. "You have no choice but to do as we say," he told me. "We've given you time, though – a year and a day." His eyes crinkled, sparkling madly. "And if you kill her before that, our spell goes away."

The first Halaster rubbed his hands together. "After that I promise you'll truly be free... but don't do something foolish, like come after me."

Nathyrra's hand was still on my arm. "Please, archmage," I heard her say through a haze of growing agony. "Please, send me and my people down with her. We have allies in the Underdark. The Seer also wants to stop the Valsharess. We can help-"

After that, words dissolved. The geas was digging into my skin, my spine, my skull. Hot tears were running down my cheeks. I'd been stabbed in the chest, I'd been shot, I'd broken bones, and none of it had ever hurt as badly as this.

Distantly, I heard a musical voice pleading. Nathyrra. Magda was cursing, and Deekin…where was Deekin? I didn't know, and there wasn't time to think about it because there was a haze of light around me, and a ringing in my ears, but even as I felt the dissolution of a teleportation spell start to tug me apart, a sudden weight clinging to my leg anchored me.

"Gotcha, Boss," a scratchy voice called. Claws sank into my booted calf. "Brace yourself. Deekin thinks this one might be a doozy…"

Then the spell hit, and the whole world tilted crazily in a way that was like being drunk only with none of the fun. I couldn't hear, couldn't see, and for a long, terrifying moment, couldn't even feel my own body.

A split second and a century later, the world untilted and spat me out. Sound and sight and feeling rushed back in time for my back to hit cold marble. I heard another collapse next to me with a squeak. My head was pounding and my back was screaming. Through the pain and disorientation, I heard people shouting and running. I heard weapons being drawn, and instinctively I reached out, groping for my own weapon.

Then, before I could find Enserric's hilt, before I could do much more than gasp for air and blink my way through the haze over my vision, I felt a hand grab me by the collar and haul me upright like I weighed next to nothing, until I was standing on my tiptoes. Instinctively, I grabbed at the arm holding me. My hand met smooth metal and, underneath it, an arm as hard and immovable as a piece of rebar.

I blinked to force my vision to clear and looked up. A pair of the brightest blue eyes I'd ever seen glared back at me from less than a foot away. "Explain yourself," the man holding me ordered. His voice was smooth, smoky, and soft with menace. "Now."


	22. Underdark

_A/N: Everybody say, "Welcome to the Underdark, Rebecca!"  
_

 _Everybody: WELCOME TO THE UNDERDARK, REBECCA!_

 _Rebecca: *^$ *$^* & $^ *#&$^ *#$*&#!_

 _Fine, I can see she's not into this. Everybody say, "Hi, Valen!"_

 _Everybody: HI, VALEN!_

 _Valen: ...pike off and die._

 _Wow. Is anybody around here in a good mood today?_

 _Deekin: OMIGAWD IT'S THE UNDERDARK DEEKIN ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE THE UNDERDARK THIS IS SO COOL!_

 _Good. Thank you, Deekin. I knew I could count on you._

 _Let's just get on with the show, shall we?_

* * *

 _I'm hiding in Honduras - I'm a desperate man  
_ _Send lawyers, guns, and money  
_ _The shit has hit the fan_

\- Warren Zevon, "Lawyers, Guns and Money"

~*~  
Chapter 22: Underdark  
~*~

A voice rang out, for once sounding rattled out of its cool. " _Nau_!" Nathyrra inserted herself between us hurriedly. She placed one hand on my shoulder and the other on the armored forearm of the guy holding me. "No! She is the one the Seer sent me to find. Do not harm her."

I felt arms wrap around my leg. "Yeah, don't harm Boss!" Deekin squeaked. "She be nice. Well, actually, she not be all that nice. But she be good and she not hurt anybody unless they really asking for it!"

It was nice to have Deekin's support, but I wasn't sure how much good it was going to do. I locked eyes with the guy who held me, not daring to look away even enough to see the rest of him, just in case he took that as provocation and decided to snap my scrawny neck like a twig. His eyes were electric blue, and his lashes were the almost invisible reddish-gold of a true ginger, a guess confirmed by a glimpse of red hair in my peripheral vision. First Nat, and now this. I knew I was a sinner, but of all the plagues the gods could have visited on me, why did it have to be redheads? What was wrong with some good, old-fashioned locusts?

I kept a grip on the angry redhead's forearm and my eyes on his. I knew by now that if I really wanted to, I could dissolve into mist and slip his grasp, or break his arm with a touch. I didn't want to do that, but the knowledge that I could filled me with a weird kind of calm. "I'm gonna side with Nathyrra here," I said. I was surprised by how steady my voice sounded, in spite of the situation and the awful throbbing in my head. "Why don't you let me go and we talk things over like civilized people?"

A new voice slipped between us. "Peace, Valen." It was smooth, light, and as calm as still water. "Nathyrra is right. I recognize this female. She is the one that I have seen. Let her go."

The guy glared at me a couple of seconds more. Reluctantly, he spoke. His voice was unusual, smooth and smoky at the same time, like scorched silk. "As you say, Seer." He released me abruptly. "I will be watching you," he warned me. Then he turned and walked away without another word.

Finally free, I settled back on my heels, trying to catch my breath. Then I froze, staring after the man who'd just released me.

 _He has a tail._ It was pointed like a devil's and lashing like a cat's. It was also long. The tip of it brushed the backs of his calves. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I'd thought I'd seen all the bizarre shit there was to see in this world. I had obviously been wrong.

With an effort, I wrenched my eyes up and away. Then I got the second shock in about as many seconds. _What the actual fuck. Are those horns?_ They looked like they belonged on a goat. What were they doing on this man's head?

Then the weird man stopped and turned to face me again, and I had just enough presence of mind to tear my eyes away from him so as not to be caught staring like a country bumpkin.

Hastily, I studied my new surroundings. I was in a circular, domed hall that looked like a temple, floored in white marble and buttressed in black. Winking purple lights, obviously magical, made it bright enough for me to see - barely. There were a couple dozen drow gathered there, including a few I thought I recognized from Undermountain. They were all standing back, watching us warily but with weapons sheathed. Not immediate threats, then.

I didn't see Magda and didn't know where I was and I wasn't all that clear on what had just happened or why my head hurt so badly, but it was far from the first time I'd woken up in a strange place, and at least this time I had all my clothes on and no one was actively trying to kill me, so all in all this was an improvement over the usual.

My eyes settled on a drow woman. She smiled at me. Just like every other drow I'd seen, she was delicately and breathtakingly lovely. Unlike most other drow, her face was serene. Her big, almond-shaped eyes were the dark blue of the night sky, her smile was kind, and she wore a simple dress in clinging silvery-white silk. Her long, snowy hair was pinned up in a graceful chignon at the back of her neck. "I bid you welcome, Windwalker," she said, inclining her head slightly. Her eyes lingered on my holy symbol. "That is the proper title, is it not? Forgive me. I am not as well-versed as I would like to be in some surface customs."

"Windwalker is fine," I said cautiously. "So's Rebecca. Or 'hey, you', in a pinch." I studied her face. I couldn't tell how old she was, but that was normal, with elves. "But it seems like you've got the advantage here. Who are you, where are my friends, where am I, and what do you want?"

"I am known as the Seer, you are in Lith My'athar, a drow city beneath the surface, and I would like to speak with you," the woman answered. She took a step forward, slowly, as if approaching a skittish deer. "I do not know where your friends are, but I am the leader of the drow you see here, and I assure you, we mean you no harm. Quite the opposite, in fact."

I smiled thinly. "We'll see about that. So far, I've had more drow try to kill me than not."

The Seer didn't quite wince, but her expression tightened for a moment. "I know. And I am sorry for that. But I am not the Valsharess. In fact, I am her enemy – as are you." The graceful wave of her hand took in all of the drow assembled there. "As are we all."

 _Yeah? Color me skeptical._ It took an effort not to look at Enserric, a few feet away on the floor. I hated to admit it, even to myself, but I thought I'd feel better if I had a weapon in my hands, any weapon. Strange, how in a few short years I could go from feeling uncomfortable about holding a weapon to feeling uncomfortable _unless_ I was holding one. "So you say."

"You do not trust us." The Seer sighed. "I understand. I hope we can earn your trust, given time."

"Good." I wasn't in a trusting or a forgiving mood. It had been a long tenday and my head was killing me. "You can start by telling me what I'm doing here."

The drow woman's white eyebrows rose. "I was about to ask you the same. We were not expecting you so soon, or so suddenly." Her gaze shifted to Nathyrra. "What has happened?"

Nathyrra stepped forward, clearing her throat. "I believe I can answer that, Mother Seer." Her dark eyes went to me, then to the Seer. "We managed to free Halaster from the Valsharess, with Rebecca's help. However, he…was quite enraged by his imprisonment, and he teleported us all down here to deal with the Valsharess once and for all." I saw the dark-eyed drow's throat move as she swallowed. "Halaster laid a geas on Rebecca," she explained. "She is…bound to kill the Valsharess, now. Drafted into our cause, so to speak. I…could not stop it, I am afraid. The archmage would not hear reason. I am sorry."

The Seer didn't take her eyes off of me. "Sweet Eilistraee," she said softly. "I am sorry, as well – sorry that Halaster has violated you in such a way, and sorry that you came to us under such circumstances. That was not my intent. My hope was that you would come to us of your own free will." Her eyes searched mine. "You must be exhausted, and in pain. A geas from one as powerful as the Blackcloak lies lightly on no one." She held her hands out to me. "Come. We shall talk, and I shall explain all that is within my power to explain, but first, I think you should sit and refresh yourself. My chambers are not far."

I tried to put two and two together through the ache in my head. Nathyrra had come looking for me, according to both her and Tomi. She'd said she belonged to a rebel group that was fighting against the Valsharess. Were these the rebels?

I realized that my hand had come up and was rubbing the back of my neck at the base of my skull, trying to soothe the pain there. Was that the geas? I had no idea what one should feel like. I wasn't even entirely sure what a geas was, except that it was bad because it forced you to do…something. Presumably nothing you wanted to do.

I took my hand away and looked around. The Seer was right about one thing. Whatever this temple was, it wasn't friendly-looking, and it felt as cold as a tomb. "All right," I said at last. I finally spared a glance for Enserric. He was lying cold and black on the marble floor. "I can't leave my sword here." If nothing else, he might get chatty and annoy the shit out of anyone in the vicinity. "Tit for tat. If I'm to trust you, you need to trust me. Will you trust me to bring him?"

The Seer's eyebrows lifted. "Him?" she repeated, her tone one of polite confusion.

Red light flared along the edges of the greatsword. "Oh, yes, please," Enserric said. His metallic voice echoed against the stone, and the red sparkles in the blade pulsed along with the cadences of his voice. "Do pick me up, wielder mine. This floor is unimaginably dusty, and I think I saw a spider." Somehow, the flicker in the blade managed to convey a shudder. "I abhor spiders. Their feet tickle when they walk on me, and their blood tastes abominable."

I found myself the sudden focus of about two dozen eyes. Good thing I was used to that kind of thing around press time, or else I'd have felt really awkward. "Yeah. Him. His name is Enserric, and trust me, he's even more obnoxious than he seems."

To my surprise, a faint smile of amusement curved the Seer's lips. "Your sword is sentient? How remarkable."

I shrugged. "I don't know if he's remarkable, but he definitely _makes_ plenty of remarks."

The Seer laughed softly. "Very well. Take up your sword, with my blessing." She held up a forestalling hand. From the corner of my eye, I saw agitated movement from the angry redhead. "Peace, Valen. I need not fear this woman, and neither do you."

The man's nostrils flared as he blew out a frustrated breath. "You may trust in Eilistraee's visions, Seer. But you know I do not. Let me guard you, at least."

The Seer smiled. "You may join us, of course, if it pleases you to do so. You are always welcome in my sight, dear Valen."

I felt more than saw the suspicious glare the guy threw at me. "Pleasing me has nothing to do with it," he muttered. He moved to the Seer's side, where I could finally get a decent look at him without staring too obviously. The horns and tail were freaky enough, but the whole package was no less unsettling to look at. His skin was mother-of-pearl pale, his armor was the bright emerald green of mithril, his hair was ruby red, his eyes were aquamarines, and when you put it all together, the colors were so vivid they made my eyes water. I couldn't tell what race the guy was – the bone structure of his face and the shape of his eyes said human, but his pointed ears said elven or maybe half-elven, his coloring was downright fey, and his horns and tail said hell-if-I-knew-what. His face looked like it had been sculpted from purest alabaster by such a fine and expert hand that it belonged behind a red velvet cord in a museum somewhere, which was a shame, because his permanently constipated expression effectively robbed his face of any appeal. Right now, he was turning the full force of that expression on me. "Lead on, Seer," he said, and his cold aquamarine eyes bored into me as if he just _knew_ I was hiding something and was thinking of taking me apart, piece by piece, to find it.

The Seer, apparently not noticing that her right-hand man was silently menacing her guest, beckoned for me to follow her before whisking off in a swirl of silk.

I snuck another sidelong glance at the Seer's bodyguard before shouldering Enserric and striding after her. The redhead exchanged a few quick words with a short, long-faced drow man in the hall before he followed, obviously keeping an eye on me. I tried to ignore him.

Deekin's hand grabbed the hem of my leather undercoat as we walked. I steadied Enserric in one hand and let my free hand drop to the kobold's head. "You okay, buddy?" I asked without looking down. I didn't dare turn my head too much. It felt like it might fall off if I did.

The kobold's head bobbed under my fingers. "Fine. Deekin just glad he able to hitch a ride, else maybe he stay in Undermountain with everyone else and Boss be down here all alone."

My heart clenched. "Mags. Did you see what happened to her? Or Tomi?"

He shook his head. "No. Sorry, Boss. Halaster say he teleport scary blonde lady to the surface, but Deekin not see it happen. Deekin not know what happens to little smiling man."

"Shit." I said it quietly, but with feeling. "I hope she's okay." I thought of Tomi, and corrected that to, "I hope they're okay." I didn't hold out much hope for the halfling. Tomi had been a man ready to die. Eager for it, even. But Mags….Mags was another matter. She'd been one of my first friends in this world, and I'd lost enough friends to last me a lifetime. My throat tightened. I had to blink tears away or else risk making a fool of myself right there in the hall. "I really do."

Deekin heaved a sigh. "Me, too. Magda be nice. She shake Deekin's hand and everything, like Deekin be a real person and not just some stupid, stinky kobold."

I swallowed a lump of mixed tears and anger. "You _are_ a real person, Deeks." I laughed a little. "Anyone tries to say differently, you tell me, and I'll fight 'em, whoever they are."

The little bard reached up and patted my leg. His voice softened. "And _that_ be why little Deekin makes sure Halaster not send you down here all alone, Boss. Epic tale notwithstanding."

The lump in my throat stopped stealing quite so much of my breath. The world had gone crazy and too much was happening too fast to make any real sense of it, but thanks to Deeks, at least I wasn't alone. He was like a strange and tiny anchor, steadying me even as wild currents tried to sweep me away. "Thanks, hon."

"No problem, Boss."

The Seer led us through a small doorway in the back of the nave and into an arched hallway, which ended in a door of some strange, smooth gray material that wasn't wood but wasn't metal, either.

The chamber past the door was much cozier than the temple nave. Chairs and sofas, richly upholstered in some kind of silky purple damask, were clustered around a long, low table. There were rugs and tapestries and tables and braziers, all of them alien-looking, but the sofa looked normal enough and I sank into it gratefully at the Seer's gesture, leaning Enserric against the arm with his hilt in easy reach. Deekin hopped up next to me, curling up in the corner with his spindly arms around his knees and his beady black eyes bright with curiousity.

The Seer pushed Nathyrra gently into another chair before bustling to a table and preparing a pot of what looked like tea. Her bodyguard moved to stand next to her. He stood like a soldier: shoulders squared, back straight, face wooden, wrist resting on the hilt of his weapon at all times, butt clenched so tightly you probably couldn't even shove a toothpick up there without using a mallet. The only thing that didn't fit was the long ponytail, which definitely wasn't a military-sanctioned haircut. That, and the way he stared at me, with his face wooden but his eyes practically burning with hostility.

My hackles rose. I'd gotten the evil eye, the stink eye, and the googly eye. I'd been on the receiving end of the ten-ton glower, the hundred-meter squint, and the thousand-yard glare. I'd been eyeballed by a dragon with a pupil as tall as I was. I'd gotten stared down by an angry medusa. Hell, I'd even gotten eyed hungrily by a tribe of Chultan cannibals, and _that_ had been no picnic. So if the spawn of Satan over there thought a little hairy eyeball from the likes of him was about to rattle me, he had another thing coming.

The Seer handed me a cup of tea. I took it without taking my eyes off of her pet whatever-he-was. Deliberately, I leaned back, crossed my legs, lifted the steaming teacup to my lips, met the guy's stare, and gave him my best press secretary smile over the rim of the cup. I thought I saw his eyes narrow slightly. Otherwise, his expression didn't even change. _Tough crowd_. My smile tightened.

The Seer sat, her own cup of tea in hand and her bodyguard hovering close by. "Much better," she said, taking a sip and letting out a grateful little sigh. "Now. No doubt you would like to know more – about us, and about the Valsharess." She nodded at Nathyrra, who sat with her own cup of tea in her hand and her arm held out stiffly as if not entirely sure what she was supposed to do with the stuff. "Nathyrra, if you would be so kind?"

The other drow woman bowed her head obediently. She put her cup and saucer on the nearest side table with something approaching relief. "Of course, Mother Seer," she said. Then she took a breath and began to talk.

Words washed over me, a lot of them alien. Lolth, who after thousands of years of being worshipped by the drow had abruptly vanished, leaving her clerics whistling into the wind and a gaping power vacuum, ready to be filled by anyone who had the means to step in. Matron Mothers, the leaders of the drow Houses, and the one Matron Mother who'd risen from nothing to step into the vacuum Lolth had left behind and become the Valsharess, Hells-bent on becoming the next Lolth or something close to it. The archdevil the Valsharess had on a leash, reputed to be the source of her power. Drow, duergar, mindflayers, and a million horrible things I knew only by name, and then only enough to know it was a bad idea to be anywhere near them. But I caught the highlights of the broadcast, and those were plenty. "You're telling me she's got a pet archdevil?" I exclaimed. "Aren't those bad? Like, really, really bad?"

The Seer's redhead gave me an impassive stare. "That is one way to put it," he said icily. "'Catastrophic' and 'unimaginably horrifying' also leap to mind."

I had the feeling I'd just been mocked, only I couldn't tell for sure. The man's face and voice were utterly deadpan. I frowned. "Then my involvement makes even less sense," I protested. I watched the Seer take another sip of tea. Cautiously, I mimicked her. Then I blinked. It was chamomile. Where had a drow gotten chamomile buds? I took another sip. "She has an archdevil. She's conquered nations. I'm just some random cleric from the surface. Why does she care about me?"

The Seer sighed. "Not long ago, the devil she had enslaved warned that there was one who could defeat her. She ordered an augury and was presented with an image of you."

I felt the blood drain from my face, and looked down into my tea to hide it. My skin crawled. _The dream,_ I thought. I took a slow sip of tea, trying to get my face back under control. "Auguries," I said eventually. I swirled my tea and stared into the bottom of the cup. "So I'm here because somebody saw my face in some chicken guts. Fantastic."

The Seer smiled faintly. "I see that you do not put much stock in visions or prophecy," she said. "I understand your skepticism. I was the same, once. Know, however, that this was no simple augury. Your image was clear, and your name was spoken. I was sent this same dream by my own goddess, Eilistraee. I saw you, just as the Valsharess did, and I knew that you were our only hope against her."

The two drow and the one whatever-the-hell-he-was were all staring at me. I shifted in my seat. If I'd had anywhere to run to, I'd have been out of that chair and down the hall fifteen minutes ago. Unfortunately, I didn't, so here I was, pinned like a butterfly to a board. "I'm sorry, but I don't know what you want from me," I said. "The only reason I'm even here is because the Valsharess sent an assassin after me and stole something…very important." I had to stop and take a deep breath. Thoughts of Silent Partner stabbed like daggers, and thoughts of drow assassins in the dark finally twisted my guts with the fear I should have been feeling the second I stepped foot in this place. It was one thing to stare down some bully boy when I had some confidence I'd be able to defend myself. It was another thing to think of lying asleep and defenseless while a shadow placed a knife across my throat – to think of dying so helplessly, without even having a chance to fight. "I hoped that freeing Halaster would put me out of her reach." And now I was in her reach, thanks to Halaster.

Nathyrra was shaking her head. "It was vital to free the archmage. But it was not enough. We have simply bought ourselves time."

People had died, and all it had bought us was time. I rubbed my eyes. The throbbing in the back of my skull had moved up to my temples, and it still felt like the back of my neck was in some kind of vise. It was getting hard to think. _A year and a day,_ Halaster had said. I didn't know if Nathyrra was telling the truth, but Halaster'd definitely done _something_ to me, because this headache had started with his spell. And if this was a geas, then a year was how long I had until the geas popped my head like a grape, or whatever it was they did when you failed to do what they wanted. Sick fury roiled in me at the thought. The archmage had put a leash around my neck, and even if I could slip it, the Valsharess had me by the short and curlies. For whatever reason, she wanted me dead, and I didn't think somebody who sent assassins after strangers on the basis of auguries was likely to listen to reason. Besides, after the way her allies had treated us, I wasn't inclined to talk to her. "How much time did we buy?" I asked.

Nathyrra shrugged. "Some tendays. Perhaps even a month or two. It is hard to know." The drow woman's voice went from cool to expressionless. "What I do know is that she will not move against us until she has regrouped and marshalled enough allies to ensure not only our defeat, but our annihilation. We have opposed her for too long, and have now thwarted her plans for Waterdeep. She will want revenge, and to make an example of us. Unless we can gather enough power to force her hand, she will wait and spin her web and allow us to contemplate our approaching deaths at length."

The only two possible responses to that assessment were to run away screaming or to laugh. Because I was too tired to scream, I laughed, albeit hollowly. "Well, at least that gives me enough time to write a will." Ample time, given how short my will would have to be. The Valsharess had stolen most of my worldly possessions, including about eight ounces of quality gnomish hooch. _May she die of liver failure._

The Seer looked at me calmly. "I understand your situation appears grim. But I believe there is still hope. My goddess has shown me the way to defeat the Valsharess. I must put my faith in her." She leaned forward, reaching across the space between us to touch my hand lightly. "And that means putting my faith in you."

An expression finally broke through the redheaded man's mask. Unfortunately, it was a scowl, and it didn't make him look any more cuddly. "Seer," he said, his voice going from husky to rasping with irritation. "You know my opinions about your visions. I have expressed them many times, and I will hold my tongue and defer to your judgement – for now." He subjected me to a searching stare. From the look on his face, what he saw left him distinctly unimpressed. "But what makes you think we can even trust this stranger, much less believe that she is capable of stopping the Valsharess? Even if we assume that your vision was real, we know nothing about her except for her name and her image."

The Seer's face was grave. "If you do not believe in Eilistraee's visions, then at least believe that we can trust her because the Valsharess wants her dead. Her survival and ours are bound together." She looked at Deekin, and her expression eased into a smile. "As for her capabilities, I suspect that we know more than you think. I have had greater contact with the surfacers of this world than you have, dear Valen. I have heard the stories of this woman, and recognized her name when Eilistraee spoke it to me. She has already defeated one formidable foe." She shrugged. "Why not another?"

I turned my head slowly. My eyes bored into Deekin. He shrugged and gave me an unrepentant little grin. "Sorry, Boss. But, hey, we be even now, right?"

I blinked. Slowly, I felt my face flush. "Is that why you wrote that thing? To get back at me?"

The kobold shrugged again. "Not really." Then he paused. "Well…." He held up his hand with the tips of his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart. "…maybe a teensy bit."

"Oh." I couldn't believe it. I'd known that the little kobold was cleverer than he seemed, but this was diabolical. Then again, I _had_ left him in a lurch. "Uh. Did I say I was sorry?"

"Nope. Never. But that be okay. Boss got a lot on her mind. Deekin figured she'd get around to it. Eventually."

"Oh." I cleared my throat. "Well, I am. Sorry, I mean."

The kobold bobbed his head. "Thanks, Boss," he said. His little kobold teeth peeped out in a grin. "Now, no doing it again or you get no say on what Deekin puts in the next book."

I winced. He really was a little devil, but I couldn't find it in me to argue. Guilt strangled my protests in the cradle. "Fine," I grumbled. I turned back to the Seer, who was watching us with a curiously upraised eyebrow and a gentle smile. "Okay," I said. "We were saying. That enemy you're talking about was one medusa, minus the archdevil and the army, and I had a lot of help. Also, we destroyed a city in the process, which I'm guessing you wouldn't like me to do here."

A little defensive mumble came from the opposite corner of the couch. "The city only crashed a little."

I sighed. "It fell two thousand feet, Deeks."

"Yeah, but it landed on sand. Sand be soft."

"Not soft enough," I said grimly. At that, the kobold quieted. None of us really knew what had happened after Undrentide fell or how exactly we'd gotten out alive, we'd never talked about it, and I hoped to keep it that way. Putting my tea aside, I leaned forward, scrubbing my face with my hands. I couldn't remember the last time I'd actually slept.

The Seer was watching me, her midnight blue eyes sympathetic. "You are weary. I have no doubt that the way here was long and difficult for you." She stood. "We do not need to discuss our plans now. I did not even anticipate that you would be here so soon. The Valsharess will keep for one night, and you must rest and regain your strength." She rang a bell. A drow appeared at the door, saying something in their language. It sounded like a question. The Seer answered. The drow bowed and vanished, and the Seer turned back to me, smiling. "I have asked that chambers be prepared for you and your friend, here in the temple proper. Its halls are guarded by my people. You may rest easy."

 _'_ _Rest easy' and 'surrounded by drow',_ I thought. _Now there's an oxymoron for you._ Still, I was only mortal and had to sleep eventually. "Thank you," I said. Sometimes I even remembered the manners daddy had tried so hard to teach me. I stood. I had to lean on Enserric to keep from swaying. "I think I'll take you up on that offer."

The Seer nodded. "Valen?" she inquired. "Would you see our guest to her chamber? I would like to hear the rest of Nathyrra's report."

The guy's tail twitched so hard that it whapped the leg of the table behind him with a surprisingly solid-sounding _thunk._ His face didn't show much, but his eyes snapped blue fire, and the pause before he spoke was long and eloquent. "At once, Seer," he said.

The walk through the halls was conducted in stony silence. Mister 'I-Need-More-Fiber-in-my-Diet' still had that constipated expression on his face and must have been planning a trip to the bathroom after he dropped me off, because he took off with a brisk, long-legged stride that forced Deeks to run to keep up. I didn't have to run. I had long legs, too, and after spending most of my life in a city famous for its fast walkers, plus a couple years on the road, I knew how to cover ground. I kept pace, and studied the guy sideways. We were close enough in height that he could easily have looked me in the eyes if he'd just turned his head, but he didn't even bother. Irritation flared. He didn't have to _like_ me, but he could at least try not to act so openly disdainful. What was his problem? "So," I said, my tone as bright and sharp as a needle's tip. "The Seer seems nice."

Valen's eyes stared straight ahead. "Does she?" he asked, his tone disinterested.

"Mm-hmm. I like her taste in furniture."

"Do you?"

"Yeah." I looked around appraisingly. "This place could use better lighting, though."

"Could it?" Still with that flat tone.

I was going to get a reaction out of this guy if it killed me. It probably would, judging by the breadth of his shoulders and the size of that flail he carried at his hip, but the stress and exhaustion of the past few days seemed to have sent me sculling over the sea of angst, across the horizon of good sense and right into the happy clouds of don't-give-a-damn. "Yeah. And maybe a few curtains. Chintz, I think. It'd balance out that 'whips and chains' ambiance you've got happenin' here."

"Would it?" The redhead turned a corner on his heel. "Your chamber is this way."

I mimicked his deadpan tone. "Is it?" _That_ got him to spare me a glance, quick and sharp and annoyed. I grinned as soon as he looked away.

We turned another corner. A drow was hovering outside a grey door. "Yes, it is," the redhead said quellingly, and came to an abrupt stop. He stared at a point somewhere slightly above and about two feet behind my left shoulder. "Do you need anything else?"

The drow opened one door for me and the one across the hall for Deekin, bowed wordlessly, and left so quietly I had to watch him to make sure he was gone. I folded my arms and leaned against the doorjamb, studying the redheaded whatever-he-was. "You know," I said conversationally. "I get the feeling you don't like me."

Valen's eyes flicked to me. "Untrue," he said softly. "I do not know you well enough to dislike you."

My voice was tart. "Oh, so you're just waiting to get to know me better so you can _really_ dislike me?"

That got him to actually look at me. He frowned slightly. "It is not a matter of like or dislike. It is a matter of trust. I do not have the Seer's faith in her visions, I do not know you, and you smile like a sphinx." His frown deepened. "I do not trust you. That is all."

A sphinx? So I was made of stone and didn't have a nose? "What, exactly, do you expect me to do to you? Either I kill the Valsharess, or she kills me." Saying it out loud made dread hit me so hard it damn near stole the breath out of my lungs. My control over my voice started to break, and so did my voice. "And if not me, then everybody else in this world who doesn't want to do what she tells them to do, and this may come as a surprise to you but I _like_ this world and don't want to see it ground under anyone's heel. So, it looks like we're on the same side, whether we like it or not."

Valen studied me. His eyes were a blue as clear and scorching as the late summer sky – a strange sight to see, so far down in the dark. "There is another option," he said.

"Which is?"

"If you prove yourself a formidable enough foe, the Valsharess will offer to spare your life if you agree to ally with her and betray the Seer."

I stared at him. "She tried to kill me."

A brief, grim smile flickered across his face. "Among the drow, attempted murder need not stand in the way of a useful alliance."

I gritted my teeth. "Yeah, well. It does for me."

He tilted his head to one side, considering. "Let us hope so." He turned to go. "Lock your door," he added over his shoulder. "I will place a guard."

I shot upright, my arms unfolding automatically. "You have got to be kidding me!" I exclaimed. "Bad enough I'm under a geas, you want to keep me a prisoner, too?"

Valen rounded on me, stepping just a little too far into my personal space for comfort. His blue eyes flared red. "This is not about what you want." Given the heat in his eyes, I'd have expected him to shout, but his voice didn't rise at all. If anything, it got even quieter, lowering to a soft purr of sheer, deadly menace. "Nor is it about what I want. This is about what the Seer wants, and as long as she wants you kept safe, I will do my best to see to her wishes, and that includes making sure none of our enemies are able to kill you in your sleep. Do you understand me?"

I stared back, my heart hammering. _Well, I got my reaction._ His pupils had dilated, and red rimmed his blue irises. It was seriously freaky, but I'd seen freaky shit before, and I'd had people try to intimidate me before. I wasn't the scared little rich girl who'd fallen out of a portal and into a kind Ilmateri's lap. I didn't even know _what_ I was, anymore. But this little maneuver was textbook intimidation tactics, and I _was_ damn sure I wasn't about to start this little venture by letting this jerk think he could get away with using those kinds of tactics on me. "Back off," I growled, meeting his eyes. "Now."

The redhead held my stare for what must have been a few moments but felt like an hour. Then, abruptly, he turned away again, his shoulders stiff and his tail lashing.

I straightened my clothes and took a breath, trying to fight back the flush in my cheeks and hide the shaking of my hands. "Set your guard," I said. Worst came to worst, I could always turn into a cloud and slip out through the keyhole. "Just make sure it's someone who knows how to knock."

Valen paused and half-glanced over his shoulder at me. "It shall be done," he said curtly. He rolled his shoulders as if trying to force them to relax. "Sleep well," he added, his voice tight. "I will see you tomorrow." His tone made it sound more like a threat than a promise. Then he strode down the hall.

I watched him go, half-mesmerized by the angry lashing of his tail. I'd never met a man with a tail, but I'd met cats, and if the body language was the same, he'd totally been lying about the not hating my guts thing.

A clawed hand slipped into mine. "Er. Boss?

I looked down. "Yeah?"

The kobold looked up and down the hall. "Can Deekin stay with you? He not want to ask, only….he not sure what these drow wants, and he not really want to be alone, in case it be something bad."

I sighed. "Sure," I said, and tugged on the kobold's hand. "Come on. Maybe we can build you a pillow fort or something."

Deekin's eyes brightened. "Ooh, a pillow fort. Deekin loves those."

My hand tightened on his. "I know, sweetie." The little guy had driven Katriona insane during our trip across the Anauroch, the way her pillows kept vanishing and turning up in our wagon. "I know." And maybe I was in the Underdark and maybe some crazy drow lady was trying to kill me and maybe I was close to alone, but at least I had Deekin. That was something.

I led the kobold into the chamber and closed the door. As soon as the door clicked shut behind me, it was as if a weight fell from me, or maybe hit me. I couldn't even tell which.

The chamber was lush, with marble everywhere and tapestries and rugs and even a separate bathroom with a big sunken tub. I barely noticed it. Five star hotels, luxury resorts, the best rehabs money could buy – I'd seen it all, and now all I wanted was a warm blanket to wind myself in and a place to sleep under the comfort of the sky and wind and stars, only the sky was so far away I was afraid I'd never see it again.

There was a bed. I leaned Enserric against it and sat. The mattress sagged. So did my shoulders, and tears filled my eyes. I couldn't help it. My head hurt so bad I could barely see straight and this was all too much, and anyway it was just me and Deekin here and maybe I wasn't the scared little rich girl anymore but I was still _scared_.

Deekin hopped up next to me. "You okay, Boss?" he asked in his scratchy voice. His beady eyes studied my face, worried.

I shook my head mutely. "I don't know if I can deal with this, Deeks," I said, my voice hitching. A shaky feeling had settled into my chest. I wrapped my arms around myself and hunched forward, trying to breathe through the lump in my throat. _Big girls don't cry,_ I reminded myself. "This is crazy." I didn't know what to do, didn't even know if Mags was okay, and the sheer not-knowing was like hooks in my skin, yanking at me with no hope of relief. I missed her. I missed Kelavir and Baz and Teddy and all the rest of my friends up there under the sunlight. I even missed Xanos, as much as I was sure he didn't miss me. I wished the big jerk was here. He'd know what to do. I had no idea what to do.

A clawed hand settled gently on my shoulder. "You got this, Boss. You gots us through Undrentide. Deekin knows you can do this, too."

All of that Blumenthal bravado and arrogance, all of those generations of blue-blooded ancestors who knew what they were and demanded what they were owed, they all failed me now. My face crumpled. "What're you _talking_ about?" I wailed. "I only got through Undrentide 'cause of you and Xanos." I sniffled. "Then I left you."

"Yeah. You did. But Deekin forgives you." The kobold paused. "Deekin not gonna let you _forget_ it any time soon," he added. "But he knows you ran 'cause of yourself, not 'cause of Deekin, so really, he not angry. He just kinda sad you thought he wouldn't understand, that's all."

This wasn't making me feel better, but then, maybe I didn't deserve to feel better. "I'm sorry I wasn't honest with you, Deeks."

"Don't be. You just gotta trust me, Boss. You be Deekin's first real friend." A slight, accusatory note entered the kobold's voice. "Isn't Deekin your friend, too?"

I swallowed. "Yeah, but…" I trailed off. Then I tried again. "It's not your problem if I…you know. Have problems."

The kobold sighed. "If you think that, Boss, then you kinda be missing the point of friends." His scaly fingers patted my shoulder gently, making my scales jingle. I'd been so long in armor, I barely noticed the sound. "But that be how Deekin knows you can handle this, Boss," he added softly. "Even if you don't know it. You think you're all by yourself, but you're not. You gots Deekin. You gots Shaundakul. Maybe you even gots some nice drow to help you. You just gotta trust us. You just gotta trust yourself." Clawtips combed through the ends of my hair, reassuring. "And you probably gotta sleep, too."

Deekin was right on one thing. I was exhausted. "Whatever you say, buddy," I sighed, giving in. I toed off my boots and curled into the blankets without bothering to undress. I was just too damn tired.

I fell asleep almost immediately, lulled by the feel of kobold claws pulling through my hair and Deekin's strangely soothing off-key humming.

* * *

I woke in a clearing, or maybe I didn't. I looked up and almost cried. There were trees, there was sunlight, there were clouds, and above all there was the endless blue sky. I'd missed it so much, I couldn't even grasp the feeling until I saw it and the longing struck me so hard I couldn't breathe.

The next thing I felt was a sense of _presence_ , of another mind slipping into my head and into my dream like a stray tomcat slinking through a door I'd left carelessly ajar.

The presence felt warm, like sunlight, and cool, like a deep forest, and I knew it at once. I cringed. "Shaundakul," I said. I didn't look at him. I couldn't, after the things I'd done.

A rush of wind and shadow swirled around me before coalescing into a dark, cloaked shape that I could just see from the corner of my eye, standing at my shoulder. "Daughter mine," said a voice as soft as a breeze. "You need not fear me or keep me at arm's length. I would no more harm you than I would cut off my own right hand."

I swallowed, staring into the trees. "How are you not angry? After what I did."

Shaundakul's voice was gentle, curious. "Should I be?"

I fought the urge to scream. This was not the time for a game of twenty questions. "Yes," I snapped. "I killed somebody because I wanted to, not because I had to."

The calm in my god's voice was unruffled. "True."

That wasn't the answer I'd been looking for. "I don't want to be a person who hurts people. Who kills people. I want to be a person who helps them." It was what I'd wanted to be when I was younger and stupider, and if now I was older and more dinged-up around the edges and knew better than to believe things were that simple, part of me still held out the hope that there was still some hope for me.

"Would you guide an assassin's blade to a victim's throat?"

I blinked. "No. Of course not."

Shaundakul went on, gentle but persistent and just a tiny bit amused. "Why not? After all, it is assistance, of a sort."

I frowned. "Yeah, but…" I waved my hands in the air, as if I could gather my thoughts that way. "Okay. I think I get what you're saying. You're saying that helping isn't always the right thing to do." Shaundakul didn't answer, but I felt his smile, like a ray of sunlight. I squirmed a little, caught between shame at what I'd done and relief that Shaundakul was still smiling at me. "Fine. But I still find it hard to believe that harming people is helping them."

"Do you?" Shaundakul asked. I felt him move closer to lay his hand on my shoulder, comforting. "When I first asked you to follow me, I bade you to follow your conscience in deciding what help to offer, to whom, and when, and why – with few exceptions. But answer me this. Did I ever forbid you to do harm?"

My frown deepened. I thought back. "No," I said slowly. "I don't think you did."

"Good. Consider that." Shaundakul's voice lowered, deepening to a rumble like distant thunder. " _I_ , my child, am not Ilmater."

I closed my eyes against tears – of relief or frustration or guilt, I didn't even know. "But it isn't just the harm, it's…" I hugged my arms around myself, shivering. "I just got so _angry_."

His voice held that same mild curiosity it often did. "Why do you fear your own anger?"

"I'm afraid of what it'll make me do." It had made me go crazy. "I don't want anything to make me that angry again."

"You need no incitement to fury, my daughter," Shaundakul said drily. "Fury follows at your heels like a well-trained hound."

I flushed. "I can't help it. In a perfect world, I wouldn't have to be angry."

"In a perfect world, my Rebecca, you would die of boredom."

I scowled. "Fine. Just…dump a bucket of water on my head the next time I look like I might be losing it, okay?"

Shaundakul laughed. "If you wish. Though you may regret the asking of it, I warn you."

"Maybe." I groped behind me for the folds of Shaundakul's cloak and drew it around me. I felt like a little girl again, crawling into my dad's lap to be comforted after waking from a nightmare – and kind of wanting to scream at him for not warning me about the monsters under my bed. "But thanks anyway."

He didn't answer, but his hand moved over my hair in steady, soothing strokes, and I supposed that was answer enough.

Reluctantly, I let myself be comforted, and at last I slipped into a dreamless sleep, bone-weary.


	23. Parasitosis

_Cause they will run you down, down til the dark_  
 _Yes, and they will run you down, down til you fall_  
 _And they will run you down, down til you go  
_ _Yeah, so you can't crawl no more_

 _And way down we go_

\- Kaleo, "Way Down We Go"

~*~  
Chapter 23: Parasitosis  
~*~

I twitched my cuffs straight. Kelavir had been right. They really were threadbare. Not much I could do about that now, though. I was broke, thanks to the Valsharess, and thanks to her there was a chance these tattered old garments would be my funeral shroud.

I closed my eyes, picturing a dark lady with a bloody whip. Then, shuddering, I opened them again and shoved the image as far away from me as it would go.

I stared into the mirror over the washstand. My reflection stared back at me, pale beneath her tan. I slapped my cheeks lightly, trying to put a little more color into them.

Turning, I picked up my thin leather undercoat and shook it out. It had seen better days, too. The leather had started off brown but was now full of weathered white whiskers and shiny patches. I pulled it on anyway, tugging it straight and tightening all of its laces with grim deliberation. Leather creaked.

The scale vest came next. It jangled down over my head until its pauldrons settled onto my shoulders and its hem banged against my upper thighs. I knew every scale on it. The majority were steel. Many weren't. I'd replaced them as I had to, when the old ones tore loose from their backing with wear, and now my armor was a patchwork of scales in many colors – steel and ironwood and zalantar and bronze and other, stranger things.

 _My, how times have changed_ , I thought, and jerked my scale armor around until it lay properly. Once upon a time I'd had acres of closets filled with the latest in haute couture. Now I wore metal and leather and only had as many changes of clothes as I could comfortably carry. If only the folks back home could see me, they'd…well, they'd probably check me into a mental institution, come to think of it. And that was if they even recognized me, which wasn't a given.

Shaking my head, I buckled my bracers over my sleeves, then sat to pull my boots on. They'd been expensive and it showed, but the suede was scuffed and balding. The knees of my brown doeskin leggings had been patched more than once with leather in all kinds of colors except the original. Right now the left was a yellowish tan and the right was dark green.

I stood, stomping my feet into my boots. The thumps echoed off of the marble surrounding me.

My belt was on the bed. I hitched everything to it and clicked it around my waist. There were two pouches on my right hip, each the size of a child's fist and full of miscellaneous supplies. Then there was one flattish rectangular pouch on my left hip, reinforced with bone, that held a collection of thumb-sized potion vials, and next to it was my belt knife in a tooled leather holster.

My cloak was on the bed, too. I folded it carefully until it was a tightly packed little square and fit easily into my pack. I doubted there was much weather in the Underdark to keep off.

Finally, I ran my fingers under the chain of Shaundakul's holy symbol to smooth the kinks out and settled the amulet so it was centered over my chest. It seemed to resonate with the divine power in me, the heavy silver amulet buzzing against my scaled chest, just for a moment, with a sound like a tray of cutlery rattling in a moving railroad car.

Fully dressed, I looked in the mirror, at my weathered face and worn-out clothes and dinged-up armor and wild hair, and I let out a derisive bark of a laugh. "Behold, the face of a hero," I murmured. The world really had gone mad.

The little polished piece of fluorspar sat on the washstand in front of the mirror. I picked it up, turning it over in my fingers. It winked at me in shades of blue and purple and green, like a piece of the sky and the trees come down into the Underdark. Raising the fluorspar to my lips, I kissed it. "I'll see you again," I whispered. "Promise." I still had to give Tarn his stone back, after all – and Baz and I still had a date with a keg of Berduskan Dark.

At the thought of the surface sky and my friends who lived under it and, I had to hope like hell, were still alive under it, pain dug into my head. It was like having a clawed hand grab me by the back of the skull and _squeeze_. Suddenly, I was leaning heavily on the washstand, holding on to it so hard that the edges bit my palms and my fingers cramped.

A knock came at the door.

With an effort, I looked up. The mirror showed me a tired woman with pain straining at the corners of her eyes and mouth. "Come on, pull it together," I whispered to myself, though I didn't know what with. I had no Silent Partner here. I had no wind here. I had no lightning here. I had no friends here - except Deekin. I had Shaundakul, but the wind blew only weakly under the ground.

 _What else do I have?_

I stared at my reflection. The knock came again. Taking a deep breath, I reached down into the past and drew out the memory of my old socialite's mask, worn through long-ago cocktail parties and receptions and conferences that I'd tried so hard to forget these past three years.

My face remembered what my brain didn't want to, though. The lines in my face eased as a smile surfaced, poised and confident and faintly arch - a lie so extravagant, only an heiress could afford it.

The woman in the mirror made me want to break it. I'd thought I'd seen the last of her, that I didn't _need_ her anymore.

 _So much for that._

I let go of the washstand and straightened, fingers flexing as I worked the cramps out of them. "Come in," I called, turning.

The door opened. It framed a drow man who was holding a kobold by the back of his little leather jerkin. " _Vendui_ ," the drow said. For some reason, he was grinning, as if someone had just told a very funny joke. "Hello. I am Imloth, the Seer's Master-at-Arms. Does this belong to you?" He nodded at Deekin. "We found it in the kitchen."

I studied the drow. He was several inches shorter than me, long-faced and pale-eyed with a slightly sardonic curve to his lips. His face wasn't beautiful, by elven standards, but he had a gleam in his eye and an air of easy, self-assured sensuality that said he knew how to make a woman forget all about a pretty face. Part of me was tempted to see if the merchandise lived up to the advertising. The rest of me, to my own private surprise, wasn't interested. Yeah, sure, it might be fun, but it was also risky, and for what? To be able to say I'd screwed a drow? Big deal. Drow did that all the time. To add another notch to my bedpost? What was the point? Wasn't like I cared or even remembered much about most of the other notches I'd put there, anyway.

Besides, I needed friends, or at least allies, and while falling into bed might earn me a temporary friend, it could just as easily blow up in my face. If I needed to blow off a little steam, I was probably better off spending some quality time with my own right hand, which was just as meaningful but a lot less complicated.

All of those calculations flashed through my head in the time it took to look between the drow and the kobold, which in terms of aesthetic appeal was kind of like going from a museum-quality artwork to a five-year-old's fingerpainting. "I thought you said you wanted to explore," I said to Deekin.

The bard grinned and tried to shrug. His cymbals clinked brassily. "Deekin was exploring everything. The kitchen was just especially interesting."

I sighed. "I apologize for the inconvenience," I lied. "Did he take anything?"

The drow shrugged, still looking amused. "No, but it would be wise if he did not go there in the future."

Deekin crossed his arms mulishly. "Deekin didn't do anything wrong," he said, dangling from the drow's grip. "He was just looking."

Imloth set the kobold down with a gentleness that surprised me. "I do not speak for the kitchen's sake, little _kuma_ , but for yours. Some drow consider the meat of an intelligent creature to be a delicacy. Eilistraee frowns on this, but not all of us in Lith My'athar follow her."

The kobold's jaw sagged. "Oh," he said, his voice a little strangled. "You means they might try to _eat_ little Deekin?"

Imloth nodded. "Yes. Though I do not know if you would be first choice. I once knew a Matron Mother who enjoyed…oh, what do you call them. _Sakphul_. You know. Short surfacers." He held his hand about three feet off of the floor. "With the-" He stopped, frowning, and made a vague sort of twirling motion near the top of his head. "With the hair like this. And they steal everything."

I blinked. "Halflings?"

Imloth pointed at me triumphantly. "Yes! Halflings. That is the word. Thank you."

Deekin blinked. "Wow," he marveled. "And here Deekin thought drow had better taste than old Boss. Who knew?"

 _Great_. On top of everything else, now I had to worry about some hungry drow turning Deekin into a kobold kebab. "Okay. Thank you for the advice. Deekin, please stay out of the kitchens and avoid all contact with drow around mealtimes."

Deekin saluted. "Got it, Boss. And if any drow comes after Deekin with a fork and a knife, Deekin _so_ outta there."

"Good call." I raised my eyebrows at Imloth. "Was there anything else?"

Imloth grinned. "Yes, actually," he said, and stood to the side, holding his hand out in a polite 'after you' gesture. "The General has sent me to escort you to the, ah-" He said something I didn't catch, then rolled his eyes in frustration and sighed and waved his hand. "You know. The room with the books."

I squinted in thought. "The library?"

Imloth gave me a sinuous bow. "Yes, that is it, thank you. The library. The General is there with the Seer." He leaned past me and looked into my bedroom. "You may bring your weapon with you, of course," he added. "The Seer wishes you to be comfortable."

I retrieved Enserric and followed the drow out. "The General?"

Imloth chuckled. "Oh, I do not think your comfort is important to him at all. Actually, he would prefer all strangers be silenced, blinded, bound, and stripped naked before coming to the Seer. He is, hmm, protective." His teeth, when he smiled, were blindingly white against his black skin. "But, good news! We were able to talk him out of doing this to you."

I blinked. "Thanks, I appreciate that," I said drily. "But that's not what I meant. What I meant was: who's the General?"

Imloth gave me a look I interpreted as surprise, given how his white eyebrows climbed. "The general of the Seer's forces," he explained. "Valen Shadowbreath. You have met, no?"

I opened my mouth to say, _'The guy with the tail?'_ but stopped myself before I got there. For all I knew, men with horns and a tail and fire-engine-red hair were the norm around here, and if I brought it up like it was something special I'd just be singling myself out as an ignoramus. So I closed my mouth, re-arranged my thoughts, and opened my mouth again to say, "You mean the guy who looks like he eats roofing nails for breakfast?"

Imloth looked mystified. "Roofing nails?" he repeated. "I apologize. I do not understand your meaning."

 _Welp._ It looked like Project Don't-Look-Like-An-Ignoramus had been a total failure. "Never mind." I decided to change the subject before I made an even worse fool of myself. _Let's try a compliment._ Compliments always diverted people's attention. "Your Common's very good. Where did you learn it?"

At that, Imloth's face relaxed into a broad smile. "I have been living on the surface for some years, with the Seer. We have not had that much contact with surfacers, unfortunately. They run away or try to kill us, and since we would rather not kill them, we must hide. But I have been able to learn some. Speaking with the General helps, and Nathyrra also allows me to practice on her. She is patient, for a female, and she was taught your language when she was very young."

I raised an eyebrow. "Weren't you?"

Imloth gave me a perplexed look. "Of course not. I am male."

The implications of his statement slowly settled in. The attitude of the Valsharess and that albino-eyed woman towards the drow men around them had drawn me a picture, and now Imloth was coloring it in. The result wasn't pretty.

We made our way through the halls. Imloth kept up a stream of occasionally broken chatter. Drow passed us, many of them glancing at me curiously and most of them no taller than Imloth. There were drow armored in cobweb-fragile chainmail in non-reflective, shadowy colors like grey and dusky purple. Other drow wore leather, close-fitting but with sharp and oddly jointed reinforcements here and there that made me think of bugs. Here and there I even saw wizards' robes, all in rich colors like scarlet and purple and deep black, embroidered in web-like patterns or even reinforced with metal plates that had that same insectile look to them as the armor. I felt like a stork high-stepping through a flock of starlings, only somebody'd gone and crossed the damn starlings with spiders, to unsettling effect.

Imloth drew to a stop in front of another gray door and winked at me. "Luck," he said in a stage whisper. While I waited, he opened the door and announced something. Most of it was in drow, so I had no idea what he was saying, but I did catch my name, which probably meant that it was time for my entrance.

I gave Imloth a sloppy salute and strolled past him. "Morning," I said, looking around. The room really was a library, two stories high with shelves lining all the walls. There were chairs, sofas, and tables clustered here and there, and a big central table with chairs all around it and some kind of model taking up its entire surface. "Or whatever time it is right now. I really have no idea."

The Seer smiled and came over to me, her hand extended. "Windwalker," she said warmly. "Welcome. How was your rest?"

Almost of its own volition, my hand rose to clasp hers. It was cool and smooth and so delicate it made my hand look like a man's. "Oh. It was great." For a moment, I wondered if I should bow. Then I realized that I didn't know how to bow, at least not properly. Then I wondered why I was even thinking about bowing to a drow in the first place. Then I realized that she was smiling at me expectantly, no doubt waiting for me to say something intelligent, in which case _boy_ was she going to have a long wait. I searched another dusty mental shelf and pulled some remnant of my old socialite manners off of it, because I had few enough friends here and couldn't afford to alienate anyone. "I haven't slept so well in days." I had barely slept at all for days, in fact, so the statement was true – as far as it went. "What were those sheets? Silk?"

The Seer nodded. "Spider's silk, actually. I am glad that you liked it." She chuckled. "It is perhaps the only creature comfort of life in the Underdark which I have missed on the surface."

My smile went a little fixed. Was she saying that my sheets had come out of a spider's ass? _Oh, god._ I needed another bath. "They were lovely," I lied. "Thank you." I pulled my hand away. I looked around. "Where's Nathyrra?"

The voice that answered was quiet and smoky and about as friendly as a spike trap. A rusty one. "She is resting. It has been some time since she has last slept, and her report to the Seer was quite exhaustive."

I turned. Valen was leaning over the table in the middle of the library, glaring me with his intense blue eyes. My back stiffened, and I strolled towards the table, hurling my best smile in his face like a gauntlet. I knew I was being childish and this really wasn't helping with my 'don't alienate anybody' strategy, but something about his attitude just mashed all of my buttons at once and I couldn't have stopped myself for a boatload of dead Valsharesses. " _Good_ morning, General!" I crowed, because just because he was grumpy guss didn't mean I couldn't just sparkle at him like a little ray of sunshine. "How are we doing today?"

His expression said that after due consideration he might be willing to concede that it was morning, but that he was going to take the 'good' part under heavy advisement. "Well enough," he said shortly.

I stopped, putting one hand on my hip. "I see." If I had to guess, he was fibbing. The skin under his eyes had the blueish tint of a sleepless night, although he was so pale that I supposed it could be his normal look. I'd never met anyone more badly in need of a tan. What this guy needed was a drink with an umbrella in it and a long vacation on a beach somewhere. Preferably somewhere far away from me. "Well, now that we're done with the pleasantries, let's get down to business," I said, my voice carefully bland so he couldn't hear the sarcasm. "You wanted to talk to me. What about?"

Valen glanced at me sharply. Maybe I hadn't hidden my sarcasm as well as I hoped. "We were just discussing possible strategies for your first venture against the Valsharess." Without looking at me again, he gestured towards a seat. "Sit." He paused. "My lady," he added, almost grudgingly.

I stayed standing. "Don't call me that," I said automatically, although I was tempted to go full Blumenthal on him if he was going to take _that_ tone. Frowning, I stepped closer to the table, my eyes scanning the model. Then I gasped, and forgot all about being angry. The map wasn't a model. It was an illusion – an amazingly detailed, three-dimensional illusion.

I leaned Enserric against a chair and moved around the table, my fingers trailing along its edge. I saw caverns and tunnels and underwater rivers and I didn't even know what else, and more vistas opened up as my point of view changed. It was like looking at a scale model of the Underdark, and it was a hell of a lot bigger than I'd ever imagined. It looked like its own little world, underground. "Would you look at that," I breathed, and I pushed my hair back and bent closer in order to see the map's details better. "Oh my God! You can even see the water moving."

Deekin climbed up onto a chair. He studied the map, his eyes bright. "Wow! Cool!" He reached out. A spark earthed itself on his hand, and he winced and yanked it back. "Ow. Why didn't anybody warn Deekin that would happen?"

Valen's lip curled irritably. "Did no one ever warn you not to touch strange magic spells, kobold?"

"Well, yeah, but Deekin figured they just do that because they don't want any smelly kobold getting his smelly hands on it."

The redhead's voice was flat as a board. "A reasonable proposition."

The Seer joined me by the table. "As Valen was saying," she said smoothly. "We have been discussing possible paths for you to follow." Her hand hovered over the image of a large cavern with a multitude of buildings in it. "Lith My'athar," she said. "We are here. We were driven back here by the Valsharess after we encountered her army during our expedition to the Underdark. The noble houses here, led by House Mae'vir, have agreed to shelter us and ally with us against the Valsharess. They have no love for us, but less for her."

I studied the image. The cavern she was showing almost looked like it housed an entire city, bounded on three sides by a river and one side by a wall. That was insane – you couldn't fit a city in a cave – but whatever. Maps didn't always totally represent reality. "All right," I said. "Where do I fit in?"

Valen spoke. "We are in a weak position," he said. His eyes scanned the map. "We do not have the numbers to stand against the Valsharess, even with our so-called allies. What we need are more allies on our side, fewer on hers, or some powerful magic to use against her. If I had my way, we would have all three." He shook his head and looked up at me, his fiery blue eyes intent. "Even if you are the Seer's prophesied savior-"

"Don't call me that," I interrupted acerbically. "I'll help, but I'm nobody's savior."

He raised an eyebrow at me. "Regardless, savior or no savior, you are only one person, and one person alone cannot turn the tide of this battle."

Enserric spoke up. "Speak for yourself," he said tartly. "My wielder may be woefully inadequate, but with me at her side, I think we can handle this jumped-up drow woman."

Valen's head turned, his gaze shifting from me to Enserric and then back to me. A flicker of red shone in his irises. "Could you kindly shut that thing up?"

Well, at least we could agree on one thing. "Enserric."

The sword's voice was sulky. "Yes?"

"Stop talking or I'll drop you in a pit." I looked down at the silk-wrapped hilt. "The deepest, darkest, most boring pit I can find. With extra spiders. I'm warning you."

The sword subsided into irritated mutters. Valen nodded. "Thank you," he told me. He didn't seem to be at all surprised by the fact that the sword was talking, just annoyed that it had interrupted him. "As I was saying. We cannot win this through strength of arms alone, but we can try to undermine the Valsharess by turning her allies against her, either by offering them superior terms or eliminating them. Here, we have a few options." He began to tick them off on his fingers. "One: Zorvak'mur-"

Deekin spoke up. "Gesundheit."

Valen stopped and stared at the kobold. "What?"

"Oh. Sorry." Deekin waved a hand. "Deekin thought you said something else. Go on. Don't let Deekin interrupt."

The redheaded man was still staring at at the kobold. "Do I have a choice in the matter?" he asked, deadpan. Then, apparently deciding not to wait for an answer to that question, he shook his head and went on. "One: Zorvak'mur-" He stopped and looked at Deekin sharply before going on. "-an illithid trading outpost. Their danger cannot be overstated, but they usually prefer to maintain a neutral position in these disputes. If we can find out how the Valsharess has pushed them away from neutrality, we may be able to push them back. Two: a settlement of undead, where our scouts have spotted some agents of the Valsharess. Three: a city of beholders, which the Valsharess has been attempting to entice to her side. We may be able to entice them away. Or kill them."

I leaned my fists on the table, staring at the man across from me. "You're suggesting we try to bribe a city of beholders into joining us?" I asked incredulously, forgetting in my shock to keep my brain tuned to the local lingo. "With what? Discounts on prescription eyeglasses?"

Finally, an expression that wasn't a glare flickered across his face. It looked like confusion. Then it sharpened right back into a glare. "Would you rather have them fighting for the Valsharess?" he demanded.

"I'd rather have them dead, but that strikes me as a tall order." Especially with no lightning at my disposal and Silent Partner gone and, in its place, a sword I didn't really know how to use. _Oh, God._ I felt a quaver in my chest and took a deep breath to cover it. I had no choice. It was either find a way to deal with this or die. "All right," I said then. My hand closed around my holy symbol. For a moment, I thought I felt a presence behind me, as warm as sunlight and as cool as the shadows under the trees. My nerves steadied. "What else have we got?"

The Seer laid a hand on my shoulder. "There have also been rumors of activity in two islands on the Dark River," she said. Her other hand traced the tiny model river bordering the tiny model of Lith My'athar in her map. "There have been rumors of golems found on one island, this so-called Isle of the Maker. If a way can be found to command them, they may be a valuable addition to our forces." Her finger moved a little farther. "In addition, a strange town has recently appeared. My scouts report that elves have been sighted – surface elves, apparently, within a surface city apparently transported to the Underdark, intact. It must have taken powerful magic to accomplish this, and they may be more willing to speak to us. Perhaps they will even be willing to share some of their magic."

That seemed like a smarter place to start than marching right into a nest of killer eyeballs. "How far away is this island?"

The Seer spread her hands. "For that, I am afraid that you must ask Cavallas the Boatman. He knows the secret ways of the Dark River better than anyone, even the drow of House Mae'vir."

"Less than a day, I think, as time is counted on the surface of this world," Valen supplied. He was frowning, but for once it wasn't an annoyed frown, just a thoughtful one. "Perhaps I can show the lady Blumenthal around the city, and we can go speak to Cavallas," he mused. He nodded at me. "It may allow you to learn the lay of the land – so to speak."

I raised my eyebrows. "Still not a lady," I said. "That…does sound like a good idea, though."

The Seer smiled. "That seems wise," she agreed. She straightened at a knock on the door and called a response. The door opened and a drow head poked in. After a brief exchange of words, the messenger vanished again. The Seer turned to me, taking my hands once again. "Duty calls, it seems," she sighed. "Not to worry. I leave you in Valen's capable hands." She squeezed my hands and let go. "Faith, Windwalker. My goddess has seen that you will aid us. It only remains for you to discover how."

Valen had straightened. His forehead furrowed. "Do you have someone trustworthy to escort you?" he asked the Seer. "You should never be alone among these drow. Half of them are waiting to slip a knife in your back, and the other half are only staying their hands because they would like to keep you alive long enough to deliver you to the Valsharess personally."

At the news that most of the people in the city wanted her dead, the Seer just smiled her serene smile. "Never fear. Imloth is waiting for me outside," she said.

The red-haired man relaxed. "Good." Then he bowed. For a moment, his face softened into what might have been the very beginnings of a smile. "Mother Seer."

In the face of his near-unsmiling salute, the Seer gave him a gentle smile, stepped to him, stood up on her tiptoes, and planted a light kiss on his cheek. "Blessed be, my son." Then she left, closing the door softly behind her.

Silence fell. It was amazingly awkward.

I pretended to study the map while studying Valen from underneath my lashes. I wondered what the story was with him and the Seer. He fussed over her like the world's unlikeliest mother hen while she treated him kind of like a son, but from the looks of him he pretty evidently wasn't a blood relation, and from the way he expressed his doubts he just as evidently wasn't a religious fanatic. No, there was something else happening there, but I'd be damned if I could figure out exactly what that was.

Armor clinked. "Looked your fill?" Valen asked with deceptive mildness.

I looked up and met his eyes. The momentary softness I'd seen in his face had already been quashed by his usual grim expression. "Maybe," I said. Idly, I dug my little fluorspar out of my pocket and played with it, rubbing my thumb over its polished surface. "So, is this how you're keeping an eye on me now? You'll be my guide slash parole officer?"

Valen quirked an eyebrow. It was a little darker than his hair, sharply arched, and thin. "Perhaps," he said coolly.

I bit back a sigh. This was going to be the opposite of an enjoyable partnership. It was almost as bad as those first days with Xanos, before we'd come to enough of an understanding to stop wanting to murder each other, only worse, because Xanos had never been this uptight. Obnoxious, yes. Incapable of smiling, laughing, or in fact of giving any indication that he knew what a sense of humor was, no. "Well, if we're going to go, let's go," I said, resigned. I was in no position to turn down help, however grudging and unpleasant, and if the drow had put this guy in charge of their army, there was a good chance he at least knew his way around a fight. My stomach grumbled. I slapped a hand to it, making my scales clink. Abruptly, I remembered that I'd been surviving on minimal rations since I'd left the Yawning Portal. So much had happened that it had pushed food right out of my mind, but my stomach seemed bent on reminding me. "Hold that thought. Is there anywhere where I can find some food, first?"

Valen blinked. His tail gave an odd little jerk that put me in mind of a startled cat. "You have not eaten?"

"No." There had been a tray delivered to my door, but I hadn't recognized the drow who'd delivered it, so I'd left the food where it was.

"Oh." The redhead rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I have some things to take care of before we leave, but I will send word for Nathyrra to escort you to the kitchens." His expression didn't change, but his voice went bone dry. "I do not think anyone will try to poison you in front of her."

So I wasn't the only one around here who was paranoid about getting some strychnine in my blueberry muffins. "Thanks."

He nodded shortly and went to the door. There was another brief exchange in drow – so he spoke the language, apparently – before he turned back to me. "Do not leave this room until Nathyrra comes for you," he instructed curtly. "The guards are trustworthy, but I cannot vouch for whomever you may encounter in the halls."

And, conveniently, this kept me under the eyes of someone he trusted, at all times. This guy really didn't want to take his eyes off of me if he could help it. I was pretty sure he wouldn't kill me as long as the Seer wanted me alive, though, and she'd had enough chances to kill me, so… "Fine," I said. Besides, if push came to shove, I always had my little cloud trick. "I'll wait here."

His eyes studied my face, unreadable. "Thank you," he said, and sketched a bow. Behind him, his tail waved sinuously. I couldn't tell if he was actually aware of what it was doing or if, like a cat's tail, it was semi-independent and occasionally surprised its owner by doing things he never intended for it to do. "I will find you when I am done." He paused. "My lady."

The door closed behind him. I felt some tension go out of my shoulders. Blowing out a breath, I flopped onto the nearest chair. "Why does he say 'my lady' like that?" I muttered.

Deekin had slid off of his own chair as soon as the door was closed and gone wandering along the shelves, running his claws along the books' spines with an expression of bright-eyed interest. Now he spared me a glance over his shoulder. "Like what?" he asked.

"Like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth."

The kobold shrugged. "Maybe he ate the wrong thing for breakfast."

I snorted. "Yeah, like somebody's soul." I'd thought it as a joke before, but if I didn't know better, I might have believed he really was some kind of demonspawn.

Enserric's voice rose from somewhere near my right elbow. "Actually, yes," he said.

I turned sharply to face the sword. "What?" I asked.

The sword flickered. "You are correct, my wielder. Or partially correct. He is a tiefling. A human with demonic ancestry."

A memory stirred. "You mean like J'Nah? But she was..." I thought back. "Elven. Or something." I frowned. "And she didn't look much like him."

"Yes. Daemonfay, technically, but the general principle is the same - a mortal with demon blood. As for the differences in their appearance, how that blood manifests itself can vary widely." Enserric paused. His voice became oddly diffident. "You seemed to have some confusion on that point, and given that there are apparently no such beings where you come from, I…thought it behooved me to clarify."

His meaning sank in slowly. I leaned close to the sword and lowered my voice to a harsh whisper. "How the hell did you find that out?" I hissed. "About me, I mean."

"Oh, do not take that tone with me, young lady," Enserric replied snippily. "Your home occupies a prominent position in your mind. It is there for anyone to stumble over, if they ever reach into your thoughts."

Deekin had stopped browsing the shelves. He looked back and forth between us. "Oh, dear," he said. He edged closer. "Boss? What be going on?"

I stared at Enserric grimly. Then I sat up. "I'm selling this thing the next chance I get," I said, my voice tight. "That's what's going on." Then I thought again. What if I sold him and he tattled? I didn't need a bunch of drow knowing there was a vulnerable, magic-less world full of humans out there, ripe for the picking.

Red flashed out of the black blade. "That is a vile accusation to make," Enserric huffed. "And after all I have done for you, too."

I scowled. "I thought I told you to stay out of my head."

"Yes, well." The sword stopped and cleared his non-existent throat. "There is a problem with that."

"Another problem? Right. Wonderful. So what's this one?"

"I…do not seem to be able to."

"What? Why not?"

"Because roads run two ways, my wielder – as you well know. I may transmit life force to you, but it seems you can transmit thoughts to me. The conduit between us is open, and I…cannot seem to shut it. Your thoughts keep bleeding through. At least, the particularly strong ones do." Enserric hesitated. "Perhaps if you were to think more quietly-"

I put my hands in my hair and seriously considered bashing my head against the table. I was going to go insane. That was all there was to it. I was in the Underdark, I had a megalomaniacal drow trying to kill me, I was about to go on a riverboat cruise with a man who was living proof that gingers really were evil, and now a vampiric sword was sucking the thoughts out of my head. "How does someone think quietly?" I snarled, trying not to shout.

"I haven't the foggiest idea. Perhaps you could try not thinking at all? That should not be difficult, for you."

Deekin crawled onto the chair next to me. He examined Enserric curiously. "So you be saying you can read Boss's mind? Wow. What it look like in there?"

"Utter chaos," Enserric answered flatly. "You have no idea." For a split second, I felt a weird sensation in my head, as if somebody was flipping through my brains like they were going through a rolodex. "Although there seems to be a rather extensive and well organized collection of cocktail recipes in here. Have you ever considered writing a book?"

I clutched my head. "Stop going through my thoughts like that," I said hoarsely. I shuddered. "It feels creepy."

Deekin looked back and forth between us. Then he leaned close to me. "Boss? What, exactly, be going on?"

I took a few deep breaths. It didn't work. I still wanted to cry. "Enserric says the sword he's in is vampiric and there's some sort of psychic connection thingy between us now," I explained, my voice low. "Apparently it happened when I picked him up."

Deekin nodded thoughtfully. "That makes sense. Vampire swords suck life out of things and give it to the wielder. That means they gots to have a connection to the wielder's life force, somehow." His hand hovered over Enserric's blade without touching it. "And the enchantment on this sword be pretty strong. See all the little markings etched in it? So the connection probably be pretty strong, too."

"Yes." Enserric's voice was resigned. "Had I known all of this before, I think I might have stayed with the old king. At least he was quieter."

"That's a great idea," I agreed fervently. I reached for the sword's hilt. "Why don't I just put you back there?"

"Ah…even if you could return to Undermountain, I am afraid that getting rid of me may no longer be a viable solution," Enserric said. The blade pulsed red, briefly. "I…would like to conduct a small experiment. Quickly, while we are still alone."

Why not? If the world had gone insane, I might as well play along. "Fine. What do you want me to do?"

Deekin clapped his hands. "Ooh, an experiment," he said. "Can Deekin help?"

"I doubt it," Enserric said, his voice flat. Then his voice went oddly formal. "Wielder. Attend me. Kindly pick me up and place me against the far wall." I did so. "Good. Now go to stand against the opposite wall." I set the sword down against a bookcase and backed away. "Further. Further. There. Do you feel anything?"

I raised a hand and rubbed my forehead. "A little woozy, maybe. And I've got a headache. But I haven't really eaten in a while and I have a friggin' geas on me, so none of that's a surprise."

"Very well." Enserric's voice was faint. "Come pick me up."

I did. As soon as my fingers closed around the sword's hilt, a cool tingle went through me and the faint wooziness went away. I blinked and straightened. "All right," I said, my voice trembling. "What the fuck is happening?

Enserric flickered. "Er."

My fingers tightened around the sword's hilt, and my voice took on a note of hysteria. "'Er' is not an answer, Enserric. Try again. Now."

The sword sighed. "It is quite simple," the sword said. "Do you recall that you killed a drow with me back in Undermountain, shortly after you first found me?"

A frantic blur of memory replayed in my head. I winced. "Yeah. You chopped his arm off. Well. I did. We did. Whatever."

"Yes. And here is where I must apologize, for I believe I was mistaken before. I said that the conduit must have been established when you first picked me up. I think that the groundwork was laid for it, but it was not truly established until you used me to kill."

My blood ran cold. "And now?" I asked hoarsely.

"And now, it seems that your life force is inextricably linked to this sword. As such, I believe that I will not only be quite useless to any other wielder while you still live, but that putting any real distance between us may be detrimental to your health." Enserric hesitated. "I…am sorry. In truth, I am no longer a mage in anything but memory, and those memories are so fragmentary that I sometimes wonder if they are even real. If I were truly Enserric the Grey, perhaps I would have been able to predict this. Or perhaps not – necromancy was never my specialty, if I recall correctly. As it is, I can only surmise that the enchantment on this sword is somewhat…double-edged." He sighed. "Perhaps a sufficiently powerful cleric or mage will be able to break our link, but for the time being, it appears that we are stuck with one another."

I realized that I was sitting. My knees didn't feel all that stable. "Shit," I said. A weird, hitching little laugh escaped me. "The hits just keep coming, don't they?" I'd lost Silent Partner, I'd lost my lightning, I might have lost another friend for all I knew, and now I was apparently addicted to a sword, which was about the least enjoyable addiction I could possibly think of. Was I stuck with this thing forever? _God._ What if I survived this? What was this going to do to my love life? What would I tell the next guy I slept with when Enserric started shouting out advice and commentary? ' _Sorry, that's just my sword, he's a little opinionated, just kick him under the bed and pretend you can't hear him.'_ For that matter, what would I do if Enserric gave the guy _good_ advice?

"Given your luck with men, one might think you would be grateful for the assistance," Enserric muttered.

I stared at the sword. Then I buried my face in my hands. "Kill me," I moaned. "Just kill me now."

Deekin's hand rested on my shoulder. "We gots to be real careful here, Boss," he said quietly. "We can't let anyone know about this. What if they take it away? If they took it far enough, they could kill you."

Enserric hmm'ed. "Weaken you, certainly, though by how much is uncertain."

And I'd already had one weapon stolen, so it wasn't like having the second one taken was impossible. _Fantastic._ I took a deep breath. Then another. Then another. Then, using the greatsword to lever myself up, I stood. "Find a way to fix it, Enserric. Either break that link or figure out a way for us to work together well enough for me to stay alive, because if we can't do that, I'll be dead and you'll be stuck in the Underdark."

"Yes, well, perhaps if I can find a reasonable replacement wielder, the Underdark may even be tolerable-"

I cut him off. "It's full of spiders."

Enserric paused. "Ah. Hmm. I see your point." The sword pulsed red momentarily. "Very well. I will try my best, wielder."

I would have been a lot happier if he didn't sound so uncertain.


	24. City of Angels

_I watch the work of my kin bold and boyful  
_ _Toying somewhere between love and abuse  
_ _Calling to join them the wretched and joyful  
_ _Shaking the wings of their terrible youths_

 _With her sweetened breath, and her tongue so mean  
S_ _he's the angel of small death and the codeine scene  
_ _With her straw-blonde hair, her arms hard and lean  
_ _She's the angel of small death and the codeine scene_

\- Hozier, "Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene"

~*~  
Chapter 24: City of Angels  
~*~

A soft knock made us all jump.

The door creaked open a moment later. Nathyrra's sleek and lovely head appeared through the gap. "Ah. Rebecca. There you are." The rest of the drow's body followed her head. She was wearing the same dark leather and swords as before. "Valen said that you required food. Was the meal the Seer sent to your chambers not to your liking?"

I resisted the urge to hide Enserric behind my back. "Is that who sent it? Sorry. I didn't know, so I didn't eat it. Next time, maybe have someone include a note. You know, something like," I mimed writing with an imaginary quill and put on a mock cheery voice. "'Enjoy your meal! Love, the Seer'. Or maybe, 'Die in agony, human whore! Kisses and hugs, the Valsharess'."

Nathyrra blinked at me. Then she chuckled. "Yes, I suppose I would have reacted the same, in your place. I apologize – I will let the Seer know that we must be clearer on the origins of your food from now on." She ran a hand over her silky white hair, thoughtful. "I think she has been too long away from the Underdark, or perhaps she is merely too good for us. I think she has forgotten what it is to live among those who wish to kill you."

I raised my eyebrows at her. "And you haven't?"

Nathyrra's voice was quiet. "I have not yet been able to forget." She lifted her hand, beckoning. "Come with me, then, if you please."

I nodded and looked at Deekin. The little kobold was lost in the stacks, entranced. "You want to stay here, Deeks?" It was probably no less safe than anywhere else, and anyway I knew how well he could hide if he had to. "Probably best if you don't go near the kitchen, anyway."

Without looking at me, the kobold waved a hand. "Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure. Have fun, Boss."

So much for my ego - I'd just been summarily dismissed by a kobold. Glumly, I picked up Enserric and turned back to Nathyrra. "Let's go."

We walked down the halls. I'd always thought that surface elves moved like they were dancing. Nathyrra didn't. She slinked, like she was hunting. Next to her, I felt like a giraffe, all hulking shoulders and improbably long legs and big, clomping hooves. Next to her, it was hard not to feel like the prey to her predator. "How long have you been with the Seer?" I asked Nathyrra, more to break the silence than for any other reason.

Nathyrra frowned thoughtfully. "A few months, I think. As you surfacers measure time."

"Really?" Maybe that was why she seemed so dedicated – she hadn't been here long, which meant she probably had a lot to prove. "What did you do before then?"

If I hadn't been watching her as I spoke, I thought I would have missed her little hesitation. "I was trained as an assassin."

I remembered her appearing behind the drow who'd been guarding Halaster. Nathyrra had slit the woman's throat with ruthless, mechanical efficiency. I blinked. "Holy shit. You're serious, aren't you?"

Nathyrra tilted her head and narrowed her eyes slightly. "Yes, quite," she said, as if surprised that she even had to answer such a silly question. "Though I do not understand how shit may be holy, and how this relates to whether or not I am jesting. Is this some strange surfacer belief?"

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. "It's just a figure of speech. You, uh. Say it when you're really surprised by something."

Nathyrra nodded. "Ah. Now I understand." She waved a hand. A ring flashed on her middle finger. "But you need not be concerned. The Seer has shown me a better way. I have renounced my former life and laid my soul at the feet of Eilistraee."

 _So you claim,_ I thought, and wondered whether all of this paranoia was going to put me in a strait jacket before long. Then again, Nathyrra and I had worked together in Undermountain, and I was none the worse for wear. She'd even kept Valen from killing me the first time he saw me, so maybe she really was on my side. For now.

We turned into the kitchens, which were surprisingly kitchen-like. I hadn't really known what to expect, but had had some vague idea of a dark dungeon with slimy things wriggling in baskets and kobolds getting chased around the stove with cleavers. Instead, I saw long marble counters, a coal-fired hearth, baskets of what looked like mushrooms and lichens, buckets of weird spiny white fish, meat turning on spits, and trays of baked things cooling on a counter. Jars full of powders and dried herbs and sauces sat on the mantel above the hearth. Cooks bustled around, doing normal cook things, which included ignoring us.

There were drow seated at the long counters. They were eating and talking together, pretty much like anyone else in the world, even if they _looked_ like no people I'd ever seen. As we walked in, a few turned. Nudging elbows and turning heads rippled through them, and the conversation paused for a second before renewing in slightly more hushed tones. I fought back the urge to stick my tongue out at them. This was almost like being back home. All that was missing were a few paparazzi.

Then I almost forgot about drow, because a surprising aroma was suddenly meeting my sinuses, pinging taste buds almost atrophied from long disuse. I drifted towards it, following my nose. It was coming from one of the counters. There was a petite, braided drow woman standing in the way, doing something with a pitcher. She looked over her shoulder at me, maybe hearing my footsteps. I gave her my best smile. She blinked. "Hi," I said, and pointed to a steaming pitcher on the counter behind her. "Can I see that, please?" The woman looked confused, but she moved obligingly enough. I went to the counter, leaned over the pitcher, and inhaled a waft of heavenly scent. "Oh, my god," I breathed. "Is that coffee? It smells like coffee."

Nathyrra came to stand beside me. "No. I do not know what this – coffee, you said? – is, I am afraid." She pointed at the pitcher. "That is black wine, though it is not actually wine. It is made from beans that grow beneath certain mountains of the surface. We normally drink it hot, with sugar and rothe milk."

I shrugged. "Sounds close enough." I sniffed again. "Smells it, too. Will it kill me?"

Nathyrra lifted her white eyebrows. "Most likely not." Reaching past me, she took a mug from behind the pitcher and poured a finger's worth in the bottom. She sniffed, swirled, sniffed again, and finally took a sip which she held in her mouth thoughtfully for a while, then swallowed. Her face was easy to read, this time. It was scrunched up in disgust. "No," she said at last. "It tastes terrible, but it always does. If you would like to drink it, however, I believe it is safe."

I blinked at her. Had she just poison-tasted my coffee? And did I trust her word, or didn't I? I wasn't sure, but Shaundakul had granted me the power to manipulate air, not to live on it instead of food, so sooner or later I was going to have to eat. "Good enough," I said, and poured myself a mug. "So what would have happened if it were poisoned?"

Nathyrra smiled and held up her hand to show me the ring on her finger. It was a thin, twisting band in some kind of iridescent purple metal. "Unless the poison were rare or magical, very little."

I turned to face the drow, leaning my hip against the counter and taking a ginger sip of steaming hot not-coffee. "Mmh. And if whatever was in there was rare or magical?"

Nathyrra shrugged. "I might become quite ill," she said, her voice as calm as if she were discussing the weather. "Or die."

I stared at her through a faint haze of steam. "You're kidding me," I said, then mentally kicked my brain into the right vernacular. "Jesting, I mean."

The drow woman returned my stare evenly. "The Seer believes that you are the key to defeating the Valsharess. I do not know you, but I do have faith in the Seer's visions. If she says that we need you alive, then I will do what it takes to keep you alive."

I shifted my stare to the mug in my hands, trying to hide my grimace. _These people are nuts_. _I'm just a spoiled rich girl who ran away from home and got religion._ And here Nathyrra was willing to drink poison to protect me, not even because she gave a damn about me personally but because someone she did care about had told her, in defiance of all reality and good sense, that I was something special.

This blind faith in the Seer and Eilistraee made me want to grab all of these people by the shoulders and scream at them, only I didn't think it would do any good. It was as if they'd all been caught up in a madness huge enough to have its own gravity, and it was pulling me in with them, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Nathyrra was watching me with a sort of penetrating sympathy. "This must be overwhelming. I do not envy you." She looked around and beckoned for me to follow her. "Come. There is someone I must introduce you to." She led me to a drow woman in an apron. "This is Laele," Nathyrra said, nodding at the other drow. "She follows Eilistraee. You may trust any food that comes from her hand." She spoke to the other woman. "Laele, this is Rebecca Blumenthal, the surfacer from the Seer's visions. She has joined us only recently."

Laele studied me with open curiosity. Her eyes were the color of honey, and almost level with mine. "Well met," she greeted me. She wiped her floury hands on a towel, flung the towel over her shoulder, and held out her hand. Her smile was wry, and though she spoke Common fluidly, it was with a strange, slurred accent. "I remember how strange everything seemed to me when I first came to the surface, many years ago. The Underdark must seem just as strange to you."

Years of glitterati glad-handing took control of my body before my brain could stop it, pasting a facsimile of a warm smile on my lips and placing my hand in hers. "Pleased to meet you, Laele." _I can't believe I just said that to a drow._ It was as if the ghost of my father – the _polite_ Blumenthal - had temporarily possessed my tongue. "And trust me when I say that strange doesn't even begin to describe it."

Laele chuckled. "Well, I cannot give you back the sky, but I can give you something to fill your belly." She waved me towards an open stool at the counter. "Sit, please. I have some _sul_ porridge cooking. I think you will like it. It is not unlike what you find on the surface."

In short order, I found myself seated with a steaming mug of black wine and some kind of spiced porridge in front of me. Nathyrra looked at me, then, without comment, she slipped the purple ring from her finger, laid it on the counter, took a spoon, and helped herself to a taste of my porridge.

I hadn't been around elves much, and hardly ever when they ate. I'd always kind of assumed that they lived on water and sunshine, like flowers or supermodels. It was hard to imagine anything as ethereal as an elf doing anything as crude as shoving spoonfuls of goop in their pie-hole. Now I was actually seeing it happen, and it looked…amazingly normal, actually, especially when Nathyrra licked off the spoon. The only abnormal thing about her was her tongue, which was purplish. "There," she said, and smiled. "Perhaps that will reassure you." She pursed her lips. "The porridge is quite good, actually. Laele has made it sweet enough this time."

Laele looked over from where she was busy rolling out some kind of dough. "Kind of you to say," she said drily, before going back to her pastry making.

I ate, bemused. I was in an underground city, eating food which had been cooked by a drow and poison-tested by a former assassin with, if the amount of sugar in this stuff was anything to go by, a sweet tooth to rival mine. This seemed to be the story of my life: just when I thought shit couldn't get any stranger, it did.

The porridge was smooth and a little gelatinous, but it was delicately spiced with something floral and fragrant. I had no idea what I was eating, but I was hungry and it didn't appear to have killed me yet, so what the hell. Plus, this black wine stuff really did taste almost exactly like coffee, except maybe with a funkier, almost truffle-like aftertaste. I drank it, savoring each bitter, bracing sip. There weren't a lot of things I missed from my old life. Coffee was definitely one of the exceptions.

Nathyrra watched me, her chin on her hand. "The Seer has said that you are the daughter of a noble House on the surface," she said eventually.

I chased the last dollop of porridge around with my spoon. "Sort of."

"How so?"

I weighed possible explanations before settling on the simplest. "I was, but after my father died I lost everything and left."

The other woman blinked. "You are _dobluth_? Outcast? A houseless rogue?"

I put down my spoon, thinking. That part of my life hadn't been fun when it happened, but from Nathyrra's shocked tone, she could just as well have been saying, 'You have cancer?' or, 'Is that a four foot javelin stuck in your head?'. Old mental muscles, stiff from disuse, began to work again. I'd had to guard my words pretty closely in my old life as a politician's mouthpiece. I'd hated it – hated the feeling of being caged and used to parrot someone else's lies – and it had taken a constant effort to keep my mouth from running away with me, but when I'd been good at it, I'd been pretty good. Now those old muscles were keeping my tongue still. I was among even worse enemies than the press corps, here, and more and more I was realizing that I was going to have to play my cards very close to my chest. "I don't have a home or a family anymore," I said at last. Not a blood family, anyway. "So, yeah, I suppose you could put it that way."

Nathyrra nodded. "My sympathies. I am the same. My House was destroyed by the Valsharess, and my mother and sisters put to death."

I winced. "That's terrible." It was kind of a pathetically inadequate thing to say, but I'd never been able to find the page in Miss Manners' book about what to say when someone tells you their whole family had been brutally murdered. Maybe it was in a later edition. "I'm sorry you had to go through that."

Nathyrra's shrug was indifferent. "Do not be. It is the way of things among the drow. In time, I would have had to kill them myself, so in a way their deaths eliminated a problem for me. Of course, it did create a series of different problems, but such is life in the Underdark. It tests us, always." She paused. "Though I…do appreciate the sentiment. Thank you."

I felt my jaw sagging open, and snapped it shut. "You…you would have had to…to _kill…_ " Surely I'd misheard her.

There was a puddle of water on the counter. Nathyrra drew idle little circles in it with her forefinger. "The Seer tells me that things are very different on the surface. So I am not surprised that you are surprised. I will try to explain." She took a breath. "As I have said before, drow society is ruled by the Matron Mothers of the great Houses, and only the strongest females become Matrons. What I did not mention is that the position is not inherited, as I think is done with your noble Houses, but it is earned. Noble daughters are expected to eventually try to seize their mother's position by eliminating their mother and any rival sisters. My sisters and I would have contended for her throne, with the prize going to the most cunning, potent, and ruthless female among us."

I had to go looking for my voice before I could speak. It seemed to have run away. It took an effort not to follow it. These people were insane. Plus, what had happened to Nathyrra's dad? She had to have had one, but she hadn't mentioned him, or any brothers. Maybe they hadn't been around. That was a better option than the alternative, which was that they had been killed, too, but she felt their deaths hadn't rated a mention. "That's one way to do it, I guess," I said at last. Then I thought back. "Well. Actually. I guess it's not that much different from us, when you think about it. We just wait until our parents die from natural causes. Or we arrange a freak boating accident. Also, we don't fight each other directly, we make the lawyers do that."

Nathyrra tilted her head at me. "Lawyers?"

I knew that this world had them, albeit in a slightly different form than I was used to, but maybe the drow didn't do lawyers. Maybe they literally cut out the middle man. I groped for a description that might make sense to her, and finally settled on, "People you pay to figure out how to manipulate the law to get you out of trouble – or get an enemy into it." I'd even had my own personal one. Up until I ran out of money, anyway. In retrospect, it was a miracle he hadn't quit earlier. At my worst, I'd left a swathe of destruction behind me that made an angry red dragon look like a fluffy bunny rabbit. The cleanup duty must have been hell. I was glad Shaundakul had come along and seen something worth saving in that train wreck, but sometimes I still wondered about his judgement.

Nathyrra blinked. "You are from the surface?" At my nod, she went on. "Not from, say, Baator?" I nodded again. She blinked again. "Oh. I had no idea human surfacers did such things."

My lips twisted in a humorless smirk. "Only the ones who can afford it." I finished my not-coffee and set the mug aside with a wistful little sigh. "But that's all in the past, now."

"Ah." Nathyrra studied me. "Well, if you have survived the fall of your house, you must be capable. The life of an outcast is not an easy one." Then she smiled. "Thankfully, such things are also in my past. The ways of Eilistraee are much kinder than those of the Spider Goddess."

That name - _Eilistraee_. The Seer had used it, too. "Who's Eilistraee?"

Nathyrra's smile grew until the awe in it shone like a star. "Eilistraee is the Silver Lady," she said softly. "She is the goddess of moonlight, of forgiveness, and of all those drow who wish to leave the cruel ways of their people and return to the surface, to live under her light. The Seer follows her, as do I."

Was she pulling my leg? The drow had a reputation for being pretty much evil all the way through. Even I knew that. Then again, it was hard to imagine the Seer and evil in the same room together. Maybe it was all an elaborate act, but I remembered the kindness and warmth of the Seer's smile, and thought you'd have to be a damn good actor to fake that. "And these people, too?" I asked, gesturing around us.

Nathyrra followed my gesture with a glance. "Most of them. Not all. The Seer has taken the temple as her headquarters in Lolth's absence, but she does not wish to turn any away who might come to Eilistraee's light, and so the drow of Lith My'athar are allowed entry – under the eyes of our people." Her tone didn't reveal whether or not she agreed with her Seer's decision.

None of the other drow returned Nathyrra's glance, or even tried to meet her Nathyrra's eyes. A couple frowned. "They seem a little standoffish," I observed, my voice neutral.

Nathyrra's smile faded. "I have not been in the Seer's service for long. There are many who do not trust me."

"Trust is a rare commodity here," a new voice said. "Give it time, Nathyrra."

"Holy shit!" I turned so sharply on my stool that I had to grab at the counter to keep from falling. Valen was leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded over his chest. "How long have you been standing there?" I yelled. Then I had to restrain a wince. So much for watching my mouth.

The tiefling stared at me. His mouth was a grim, flat line, but there was an arch to his eyebrows that looked almost amused. "Long enough."

Nathyrra seemed to have taken Valen's arrival as her cue to leave. "Perhaps we should speak more later, if you have time," she told me, and slid off of her stool, flipping her hair back over her shoulder. "You can teach me surfacer terms that the Seer cannot."

I felt as if I'd been handed off like a baton. "Sure thing," I answered. Maybe, if I buttered Nathyrra up with inappropriate language lessons, I could even make a friend. Or get my throat slit as soon as she had me alone. I still couldn't figure out which. "I've got plenty of 'em."

Enserric sighed. "You have no idea," the sword lamented. "I have heard more vile terms from her than in most dockside taverns."

I smirked. "See? And my teachers said I had a poor vocabulary." I took the black blade back in hand, trying not to wonder whether that action made my head feel clearer or not. If there was any change, it was imperceptible. I put my poker face back on and turned to Valen. "We going?"

His face was shuttered, too. "We are," he confirmed. Standing aside, he held his hand out to the doorway. "After you, my lady."

I walked past him. "Still not a lady," I threw over my shoulder.

His low, dubious mutter barely made it to my ears. "So you say."

Deekin was waiting in the entrance hall of the temple, talking at a familiar-looking short-haired, scarred drow woman. Quarra's face suggested that she was simultaneously glad she didn't understand what the kobold was saying while also wishing he'd stop saying it.

When the kobold saw me, he broke off and scampered up, grabbing my hand in excitement. "Hey, Boss!" he burbled. "Deekin was just telling nice Quarra here, he found an old map of the surface in the library, and there be a book on dragons, and a book on drow history, and, oh, so many books, and the Seer says Deekin can come in any time and read them." He grinned at me. "Isn't that the coolest?"

My expression eased into a smile. "Positively icy, Deeks." At least somebody here was having a good time. "Give it a couple months and you'll be the best-read kobold in the world." If we lived that long. I patted his scrawny shoulders gently, feeling bones like a bird's under the layers of leather and cotton. Behind him, I saw Quarra vanish at a gesture and quiet word from Valen. I wondered how many loyal people the general of the Seer's forces had in his pocket, and how many of them he had watching me and Deekin at any given moment. "Come on. Time's wasting."

The doors of the temple were mithril-bound blackwood and made me feel a pang for Silent Partner. I walked through, blinking, into a whisper of cool air and a place of twinkling light and shadow.

Then I stopped dead, hearing a faint squeak as Deekin bounced off the backs of my legs.

The cavern outside the Seer's purloined temple wasn't some dank, cramped cave like I'd expected. It wasn't even some stony cavern, as big as a cathedral or a football stadium but still a space that felt _bounded_.

Lith My'athar occupied a space as broad as a mountain valley, with a ceiling so high that the pressing feeling of weight overhead was almost bearable, and with dimensions immense enough to hold an entire city – and that was exactly what it held.

The drow city was built in layers. Buildings rose from the cavern floor or perched on giant stalagmites or protruded from the cavern walls, built so cleverly into the stone that they almost seemed to be growing right out of it. No two structures had the same architectural style, so there were angular buildings and rounded ones, rambling complexes and slender towers, domes and spires and minarets and steep, jagged rooflines like an old dragon's teeth.

If the buildings of Lith My'athar had anything in common, it was their delicacy, but this wasn't the floating ethereal delicacy of the surface elves, like I'd seen in Silverymoon. It was as if someone had taken the elven aesthetic and twisted it into something that had the awful, balletic grace of a black widow spider dangling from her web.

And if the buildings were spiders, the streets were the spiders' webs. Lith My'athar's roadways rose and fell and swooped on impossibly thin pylons, interweaving into a system as complex as any highway interchange back on my old world. Here and there, the streets met in squares, just like in any city, only these were curved and balustraded, looking out over the uneven sprawl of the cavern floor.

Most surprising of all was the fact that I could actually _see_. The light over Lith My'athar was dim, softer and more diffuse than the light of a full moon, but it was enough to see the city around me, painted in strokes of light and swathes of shadow. Little purple lights picked out rooflines and lined the terraced streets, and here and there what looked like magelights gleamed, but most of the light seemed to be coming from beneath where we stood.

As if in a dream, I drifted to the railing of the temple square and looked over. The cavern floor was covered in fields upon fields of mushrooms of all shapes and sizes, growing in orderly lines just like trees in an orchard. There were tall, willowy ones that glowed with greenish-white phosphorescence, short ones that shone a barely visible dull white, thin waving ones with tiny heads that shot off firefly glimmers of neon purple, and lawns of lichen in robin's egg blue. The colors all came together to make a cool, always shifting light, and it painted all the stones and buildings and streets around us.

Lith My'athar wasn't dark. It was alive with light even as it was draped in shadows, a perpetual night-time city.

Best of all, I could feel a little rivulet of air running past my cheek. There was a wind blowing over Lith My'athar – faint, but there.

I wrapped my hand around my holy symbol and laughed out loud. "Oh, my God. Why didn't anyone _tell_ me it was like this?" I turned in a circle, trying and failing to take it all in. "It's beautiful!"

Valen stood by, looking at me strangely. "Most surfacers would not react so to waking up and finding themselves in the Underdark."

I grinned at him sunnily. He blinked. "Hey, what can I say? I've got lots of practice at waking up in strange places." And when I compared this to the time I'd walked through a portal just to wake up, seriously hung over, in a whole new world, the Underdark suddenly didn't seem like such a big deal. At least it was still on the same planet. I spun back to the rail and leaned out over it, pointing. "Holy crap! Those are trees! How did they manage to grow trees in the Underdark?"

Deekin came up beside me, standing on his tiptoes so he could poke his snout over the rail. "Mage lights, maybe." He pointed, too. "See? It be like a little sun."

A hand hovered near my shoulder, not touching but ready to catch me if I started to topple. "Careful," Valen's husky voice warned. "I am not willing to tell the Seer that I have let you fall to your death."

I had to laugh. Not even Mister 'Who Stole My Prune Juice?' could spoil _this_ mood. I wouldn't let him. "Don't _worry_. I'll be fine."

His hand didn't move. "Not if you fall, you will not."

I rolled my eyes, dropped to the ground, and turned to him, propping my hip against the railing. "I told you. I'll be fine." Shaundakul would catch me. I could feel his power in me still, which meant he was still with me – and not likely to leave any time soon, especially because that would mean he wouldn't get to see all of this cool stuff. His sight only went as far as his followers did, and while we went pretty far, I didn't think many of us had ever made it _this_ far. My grin widened. _Baz is gonna be so jealous._ I turned back to the view. "What's _that_ building? It looks like a giant crystal. How did they do that?"

I felt more than saw the tiefling step up to the railing to stand next to me. From the corner of my eye, I saw his hands close over the white marble. They were so pale they almost matched the stone. "That is the fortress of House My'afin." His voice, for once, wasn't hostile. If anything, it was nonplussed. "I am given to understand that they consider themselves quite the daring artists and spellsingers."

I laughed. "Well, I'm no art expert, but living in a house with see-through walls? Definitely daring."

The tiefling's tone turned bemused. "Somehow, that thought has never occurred to me."

Now there was an answer from somebody who didn't know how to have fun. "Well, it obviously occurred to somebody," I said drily. I hiked my foot a little higher on the lowest rung of the rail and leaned a little further out. "So, you never answered my question. Who's got the garden?" It was the only spot of real green in the whole place.

Armor clinked as the tiefling shifted. "That is the stronghold of House Vharzyym. They are a house of druids with ties to the surface. No one knows how they get surface plants to grow down here, and while they are certainly not sharing their secrets, they are not averse to showing off." I caught a glimpse of movement, saw him fold his elbows on the rail and lean on them, for all the world like he was enjoying the view, too. "Rumor has it that their manse has wooden doors throughout. _If_ you believe the rumors."

I looked over at him, confused. "And?"

He gestured. "Look around you. How much wood do you see?"

I looked. I saw stone, stone, and more stone. "All right. I see your point."

His head moved in what might have been an abbreviated nod. A stray lock of hair slithered over the shoulder plates of his armor, fallen loose from his ponytail. "Wood is a highly prized material here in the Underdark. Most things which surfacers do with wood are done here with mushroom fiber, stone, or metal."

I snorted. "That would explain the bed." It had felt kind of like papier mache. "I thought I'd break the damn thing if I turned too quickly." How drow had sex without needing new furniture every time was beyond me. Maybe they did it on the floor. Maybe that was why my bedroom had had so many carpets.

Deekin spoke up. "It be the same with kobolds, Boss. Hard to find wood if you be living in a cave."

I felt Valen's eyes on me. "You will get used to it. Life in the Underdark has been something of a learning experience for me, as well."

That got me to turn and face him. "You're not from the Underdark?"

The tiefling paused for a long moment before answering. "No. I am not from the Underdark." His hand slapped the railing lightly, and he straightened. "Come, my lady," he said briskly. "I shall show you the city, since you seem so curious to see it."

Looking out on the winding whorls of road and the weird and wonderful buildings that lined them, I couldn't really say no. Nor could I say no to being outdoors again, or at least something like it. There was still a whole lot of stone overhead, but it was far enough away and dark enough that as long as I didn't look up, I could almost persuade myself that it was the night sky. Almost. "Still not a lady," I said, my voice light. "But lead on."

Valen led me down the only road away from the temple. "Usually, the temple of Lolth is either the center of a drow city or part of the stronghold of the most powerful House," he explained. "House Mae'vir has held Lith My'athar for two generations. In drow terms, I am given to understand that this is considerable."

Elves lived a long time. "How long does a house usually hold a city?"

Valen shrugged. He walked with his wrist on the hilt of his flail, and as he spoke, his eyes never seemed to rest, constantly scanning everything around him as if he expected the Valsharess to jump out from behind a streetlamp at any moment. "There are several noble Houses in every drow city, and they scheme and contend among one another for the highest position. I believe there are five or six here. Mae'vir is currently on top, but it is no secret that the other Houses would like to topple them and rise to the top themselves." His tone was distasteful. "Such bloodthirsty ambition is the way of things, here."

It sounded a lot like the social politics back home, but even dirtier. "How do the Houses figure out their ranks?"

The tiefling frowned. "That much is unclear to me," he admitted. "It changes very easily, though. If all of the other houses defer to you because they fear to cross you, you are the highest house – but that only lasts up until another house sights a weakness in your defenses and gathers enough strength to try to displace you. If they succeed, they gain your position, and you fall. That fall is always a hard one, to the bottom or to the oblivion of death – and from what I have heard, death is the preferable fate. Drow nobles view those beneath them as little more than playthings, and the games of the drow are unfailingly cruel."

I remembered Nathyrra's story. "Sounds like drow politics are hell."

Valen made a noise that wasn't really a laugh, but which I couldn't really describe any other way. "Close."

We came to a crossroads, the center of which was occupied by a statue and an array of stone benches, arranged with geometrical precision. A group of drow passed nearby, laughing. They were dressed in some seriously exotic clothes, if you could call them that. Mostly their clothes seemed to consist of spiderwebs and feathers and scraps of silk. Their white hair had been dyed with all kinds of colors, and their faces had been transformed through artful makeup into fanciful masks, male and female both. In their costumes they looked like birds or maybe dragonflies, fragile and spindly and lovely with huge eyes in shades of red and black and silver, and as they passed, they looked at me and exchanged words and laughed.

My chin lifted and a flush suffused my cheeks despite my best efforts _not_ to react to their baiting. Suddenly, I wished I had better clothes and had done something nicer with my hair. I wasn't bad-looking – okay, my face couldn't launch a thousand ships, but I figured it could manage a schooner or two - yet next to an elf, I felt like a troll. A graceless, hairy, dull-witted troll with fat thighs and a voice like a harpy.

Worse, though, was the feeling that came over me when I looked at an elf – the sense of time, carrying me along on a swift current. I was barely over thirty and already, if I looked too closely in the mirror, I could see the changes time had carved in my face. In another ten years, my life would be close to half over, while any elf that age would be barely more than a child, with at least ten times as many years ahead of them. In another hundred years, I'd be nothing but bones, and the owners of these perfect bodies and perfect faces and perfect voices would be grinding their perfect heels into the dirt over my grave.

And, somehow, these drow were even worse than normal elves. They weren't just beautiful and ageless, they were exotic and dangerous in a way that made me painfully aware that I was just a plain old dime-a-dozen, garden-variety human.

Deekin huddled near my leg. "Hey, neat," he said, a little nervously. "Those drow look like butterflies."

I snorted a little. "Yeah. Poisonous butterflies."

"Er. Can butterflies be poisonous?"

From the corner of my eye, I watched the drow flit away. "These ones can."

As they passed, one of the women looked at Valen, said something, and laughed in a lascivious way that made a translation unnecessary. The tiefling went stone-faced and studiously ignored her, but a flush crept up his cheeks. "Those are House My'afin," he muttered after they'd passed. His lip curled, and there was a note of disdain in his voice. "Pfah. Frivolous sensation-seekers. The Sensates did it better, and first."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I could hear his opinion a mile away. "Those are the crystal guys, huh?"

Valen inclined his head in acknowledgement. "They are. You are not likely to see Vharzyym nobles on the streets – they keep to themselves, for the most part – but My'afin does enjoy showing off." He was still blushing, and his voice had gone sour. He nodded at some slightly less flamboyant drow. "There. House Kilanatlar. The ones in the red and black cloaks. They do not dare show their house insignia in public – I understand that only the first House has that pleasure – but they toe the line by wearing their colors. Do you see?"

Two drow men stalked through the square, silently ignoring everyone else. "I see. Shouldn't those be women, though?" I thought of the albino-eyed woman and the Valsharess and the way they'd treated the men around them, and the way Nathyrra hadn't said anything about what had happened to her dad when the rest of her family got murdered. "Drow don't seem to let their men do much."

Valen cleared his throat. "They say that shadow talents run through the male line in Kilanatlar, and so they are less harsh on their male members than most."

I snickered. "Hah. Members." I caught the rising flush on the tiefling's cheeks and subsided. "Sorry. Thought you were making a joke there."

Valen's voice was stiff. "No. I was not."

I sighed. "Figures."

Valen led me and Deekin to another square, always descending although never in the same direction. There was a statue of some cloaked drow in the middle of the square, surrounded by benches. A domed building with a forge out front took up most of one side of it. A tall drow with a mohawk was quenching a sword in a bucket as we passed. "Rizolvir," Valen explained. "He is the best smith in the city, if you need any work done."

Next, we passed a winding stair to a rambling building on a rocky outcropping, paper lanterns bobbing outside its door and surprisingly warm light streaming from its windows. "The public house. If anyone offers you death's head wine, pass. It is more of a drug than a drink. I have seen drow kill for a taste of it, after the first."

I'd kill for a drink of _anything_ , honestly, but a new addiction was probably the last thing I needed right now. "Noted."

"Good." Valen paused halfway across the square, his steps dragging in surprise. His eyes went to a cluster of drow about twenty feet away. "Those are members of House Olath," he said. His eyes narrowed. For a second, they took on a reddish glint. His hand shifted, moving a little closer to the hilt of that big black flail he carried. "Excuse me," he said, and walked away without a backwards glance.

Deekin watched him go. "He not gonna kill those drow, is he? Not that Deekin really minds, but things could get hairy."

I grunted. "Yeah, but for who?"

A metallic, sepulcheral voice sounded in my left ear. " _Whom_."

I didn't take my eyes off of Valen. "Shut up, Enserric." I leaned against the base of the statue and followed the tiefling's progress with my eyes.

Deekin watched me watching Valen. "Psst," the bard hissed. "Boss. Stop looking at his tail." The kobold's own tail twitched. "That be really rude. Everybody knows that."

I lifted my eyes obediently. "Guess you're the expert on tail etiquette, huh, Deeks?"

The kobold rolled his eyes and flapped his hand in a 'oh, _please_ ' kind of motion. "Oh, the stories Deekin could tell." He sniffed. "Only he won't, 'cause a gentleman never kisses and tells."

My brain broke a little _._ " _Way_ too much information, Deeks."

The kobold grinned with a singular lack of shame. "Sorry, Boss."

"Don't lie, Deeks. It's not nice."

"Okay. Sorry, not sorry, Boss."

I grinned. " _That's_ more like it."

Apparently oblivious to his two-person peanut gallery, Valen went to a cluster of drow. The atmosphere didn't look good. A few were grinning nastily, and others were stone-faced, but as the tiefling said something, the nasty grins faded and the stone faces softened. A few more words, and the losers made an abrupt about-face and stalked off. One of the winners, a drow with silvery hair, touched the tiefling's arm lightly before they, too, dispersed.

Valen returned, walking with that same effortless athletic grace I'd noticed before, as if his muscles were smoothly oiled springs. He wasn't smiling, but there was a certain satisfaction in his eyes. "What was that about?" I asked.

He snorted. "House Olath are fanatical Lolth worshippers," he said. The disgust was clear in his voice, lowering it almost to a growl. "They despise Eilistraee and resent our presence here. They were trying to pick a fight with some of the Seer's people."

I watched the members of House Olath walk away. They were all wearing clothes in shades of deep purple and turquoise. I wondered if it was some kind of uniform. "You convinced them not to fight, I'm guessing."

A faint smirk appeared on Valen's pale lips. "I have gained something of a reputation among these drow," he said. His thumb stroked the hilt of his flail, which was ugly and spiked and a dull cast-iron black. "Most drow look down on non-drow as lesser beings, but after a few confrontations, they have learned that it is unwise in the extreme to provoke my temper."

I looked him up and down. "There were four of those Olath guys," I said. I nodded at his hideous flail. "Are you really that good with that thing?"

His eyes gleamed, but his voice was matter-of-fact. "You will meet no one better."

My own voice turned into an amused drawl. "Wow. And you're humble, too."

Valen's tail lashed once, hard. His face had gone impassive again, but his blue eyes had gone icy. "You think I am boasting."

I paused. Then I shrugged. "I don't know what to think about you," I said, blunt as a mallet.

Valen snorted. "Likewise."

My temper developed a hairline fracture. "Fine." I held my arms out, offering myself to his scrutiny. "What would you like to know?" My voice took on an auctioneer's cadence. "Ask me a question, any question! Going once, going twice-"

The tiefling stopped, as well, and turned to eye me with deep skepticism. "And you will answer honestly?"

I smiled. "Would this face lie?"

His eyes searched my face as if he could tease an answer out of it just by looking. "I think it would," he said darkly. "You are wearing that sphinx's smile again."

I coaxed the corners of my lips into a solemn frown. "Better?"

Valen snorted. "Not really." He stared at me a few moments longer. "Very well," he said at last. "I will ask, since you offered. I will even ask you the same question you asked of me. How good are you with that sword?"

My face went blank. _Except that one_. _What I meant to say was, ask me any question except_ that _one._

Valen was watching me expectantly, the tip of his tail twitching like he was the cat and I was the little bird flitting past his window. I felt a weird little shiver run up my spine – nerves, no doubt. The man was objectively unnerving. After a brief internal struggle, I looked around to make sure no one was standing nearby. Then I sighed and answered his question. If we were going to be fighting on the same side, maybe he did deserve a little of the truth. Not much – it was too risky to trust somebody I barely even knew with the whole truth, much less somebody with so much hostility towards me - but if he expected me to sweep in and save him with my swordsmanship at some point, we were both going to have a bad time. "I'm not great," I muttered, pitching my voice for his ears alone. "I get by, but there are plenty better."

Something about the redhead's stance eased, although I couldn't quite figure out what. He was still ramrod straight, still had his hand on his weapon, but maybe his shoulders weren't riding quite as high and his jawline wasn't quite so diamond-edged. "Ah. The Seer did say that you are a priestess." He studied me thoughtfully. "You prefer fighting with spells, then?" he asked, his voice also pitched low.

"I'd rather not fight at all," I answered. At least, not unless I had no other choice or I was so pissed off I lost my capacity for rational thought. "But if I have to, a close fight's usually not my first resort, no."

Valen studied my face a few moments longer, then he gave me a stiff little nod. "Thank you for your honesty, my lady. If it comes to a battle, stay out of the way and guard my back with spells, if you can. I will take care of the close fighting." Then he jerked his head towards a downward-sloping road. "Come. I will take you to the docks."

Valen led me around a corner. The rumbling gurgle of running water got louder, and the moving reflections of light on water got more prevalent, although there were too many buildings in the way for me to actually see water. "Cavallas is the only ferryman who knows how to navigate the Dark River," the tiefling explained. "Its waters are poison to mortals, and its currents unpredictable."

"All right. Good to know. Note to self: don't go for a swim in the Dark River."

"I would advise against it." Valen's voice was deadpan. "It could end badly."

"Badly how? We talking drowning badly, getting eaten alive by carnivorous fish badly, or having my soul sucked out through my nose badly?"

Valen made a little noise that, if I didn't know better, I would have said sounded almost like a brief chuckle. "All of the above, I think," he answered. His tone turned brisk. "Regardless. Cavallas has not taken sides in this conflict, but he has offered the Seer's people free passage and I sense no threat from him, so I think there is no immediate cause for concern. I must warn you, however – he is little unnerving. If he even is a he. It is hard to tell, with that cloak hiding everything."

I shrugged. "If you really wanna know, I guess we could ask him to lift his skirt."

I saw a flush creep up the rims of Valen's pointed ears. "You are joking, of course."

"I am?" I hitched Enserric a little higher onto my shoulder. "Good to know. I had no idea."

The sounds of water grew louder, and we finally rounded the bend to the docks. I slowed a little as the full expanse of the water met my eyes. It was black, but gleaming, and it was as wide as the Dessarin and even wilder. The swift growl of its currents echoed off of the stone, magnified into a roar. Water swirled around stalagmites like craggy islands, foamed over invisible rocks, and swept off into the dark. "It's a damn _river_ ," I breathed, stepping forward again. I'd expected a glorified stream, not _this._ "A real river. Here?"

Valen glanced at me. His face softened, in the sense that if I punched him in the nose I'd probably just break a couple of my fingers as opposed to the whole hand. "Yes. That is one of the things that have surprised me about the Underdark. It would be a mistake to think of it as nothing but a few dank caves under the surface world." He held his hand out, palm-up, as if trying to hold the entirety of the Dark River within it. "It is an entire world, complete with seas and rivers and cities and many layers."

I walked out onto the stone quay, my boots echoing. My eyes ran all the visible length of the river, and I still couldn't see the end of it. The Underdark had always seemed to me to be so constrained, so bounded by all that stone, but this thing was as vast as any surface river. "I had no idea."

Valen's footsteps echoed after me, and his voice came from a little behind my left shoulder. "Neither did I, until I saw it."

I looked for a few moments longer, caught in a whirl of conflicting emotion. _What a beautiful, terrible place_. With an effort, I chased away my bemusement. "All right. So where's this ferryma-" I turned and saw the Grim Reaper standing at the end of the next pier, regarding me with an empty cowl that nevertheless managed to convey an expression of scholarly interest. "Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!" I yelled. I yanked wind around me defensively and took two steps backwards before I stumbled into something that clanged.

I felt hands on my shoulders, steadying me. "Watch it," a smoky voice said in my ear, the crisp snap in it an unmistakable sign of irritation. "If you knock me off this quay, I am going to be of very little use to you _or_ the Seer."

I stared at the cowl. It stared back. "This is your idea of a little unnerving?" I hissed over my shoulder. "What's your idea of a lot unnerving, then?"

The hands on my shoulders sprang away. "An archdevil in the hands of a drow Matron," growled Valen. " _That_ is unnerving. This? This is a strangely dressed ferryman."

What was really unnerving was this guy's insanely high tolerance for weird shit. Taking a deep breath, I jerked my scales straight and stepped away. "Right. Okay." I blew out a breath. "I can deal with this."

Valen's tone was so skeptical that all by itself it could have disproved the existence of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, extraterrestrial life, and, just for an encore, Elvis. "Can you?"

I twisted around and shot him a scowl. "I can. I'm just a little jumpy, okay? It's not every day I talk to…whatever he is." I turned back to the ferryman. I cleared my throat. "How d'you do?"

The cowl turned towards me. A voice spoke. It sounded like the clanging of a tomb door. "Welcome, Wayfarer," it said. "I have been expecting you."

A distant memory stirred, this one of another cowled figure and a strange awakening in a room of portals somewhere…else. My skin tried to crawl right off of my bones, and I clamped down on the memory, hard. "A little unnerving, huh?" I muttered over my shoulder.

Valen's voice was bemused. "He has never said that to _me_."

"Really? Lucky you." I turned back to the ferryman. "How'd you know I was coming? Almost no one knows I'm here."

"The Dark River does," the ferryman replied. "It felt the wind of your passage and whispered to me of your arrival." His voice was a slithering thing, and his hood was as blank and empty as a pit. "I know its currents and its moods, and I hear its secrets, like the dying gurgles of a drowning man." A soft noise not unlike one of those dying gurgles came from somewhere beneath the ferryman's hood. "I know why you are here."

Something told me he wasn't just being philosophical. "And why's that?"

"You hunt," the ferryman answered. "Such is your nature – to fly, to chase, to kill."

My breath caught. "Bullshit," I said hoarsely. The memory of cracking bones and a woman drowning in her own blood sent ice down my spine. "I'm no killer."

The hood turned to me. "You are, and your ordained prey is the Valsharess," it said. "Her soul is black and cold, and hungers to conquer and tame all corners of the Underdark to her will, even the wild waters of the Dark River. That cannot happen. You seek a way to bring her down. I will help you." A sleeve, its hand hidden, stretched slowly to the boat that stood creaking and bobbing at the pier's end. "Please."

I couldn't have moved if I wanted to. My feet were glued in place, as frozen with terror as my heart was unstrung with it. I stared at Cavallas, my eyes boring into his dark cowl as if, if I just looked hard enough, I could find his secrets and pull them all out of him, whole and wriggling, like worms from an overturned grave.

A hand tugged at mine. "Uh, Boss?" Deekin asked. "You okay?"

I wasn't okay. I really didn't want to set foot on that boat. It wasn't so much worry about where we were going as it was fear that, if I did accept the ferryman's invitation, I'd also be accepting the implications of what he'd said about me – and those were terrifying.

I heard the scrape of a boot and the sound of a voice. "Cavallas," Valen said. "Will you give us a moment, please?" The ferryman bowed his head and glided away. Valen watched him go, then turned to me, crossing his arms over his chest and studying me expressionlessly. "Are you all right?" His eyes flicked after Cavallas. "That was…somewhat odd."

I finally found my voice. It was hoarse and sounded far away. " _Somewhat_ odd?"

Valen held his blank expression for a couple seconds longer, then gave up and rolled his eyes. "All right," he admitted, his tone grudging. "Perhaps a little more than somewhat."

A shaky little snicker escaped me. "Ya _think_?" I drawled. I rubbed my forehead. It hurt, and I couldn't tell if it was stress or lack of sleep or Halaster's geas biting into my brains again. "God. Am I the only idiot who _wasn't_ expecting me to be here? I mean, was there some kind of announcement and I just slept through it, is that what happened?"

"Not that I heard," Valen replied drily. He tilted his head, regarding me with an odd expression in his pale blue eyes. "I would not overthink it," he suggested. "Cavallas could just as easily have heard the rumors about you and put together a few mysterious-sounding platitudes to make you believe he knows more than he does." The tiefling shrugged. "Or perhaps he does have ways of knowing things that others do not, but if he does, it is beyond your control, and it is pointless to waste your energy worrying over it."

I took my hand away from my forehead just enough to stare at him through my fingers. "You've got a really high tolerance for strange stuff, you know that?"

Valen blinked. "I do not think that is the case," he said with unusual mildness. "I think I just have different criteria for what I will call strange, compared to what people here will call strange. Certainly this place has surprised me more times than I can count." His eyes focused on me again. There was a quizzical little arch to one of his eyebrows. "For instance, _you_ do not appear to be entirely normal, yourself."

I burst into laughter. "Me? I'm the most normal person you'll ever meet."

The tiefling gave me an odd look. Once or twice, he opened his mouth after he was about to speak, then closed it again as if he'd thought better of whatever he'd been about to say. "My lady," he said at last. His voice was weirdly diffident. "Are you at all aware that you have been standing in midair for most of this conversation?"

I looked down. "Shit. You're right." I slowly let go of the air around me and sank down about six inches until my boots hit the quay. "Er. Sorry about that. First time that's ever happened to me, I swear."

Valen's tail twitched slowly. "Do you mean to tell me that you truly did not notice?"

"No." I had a vague memory of grabbing for air, but no clear memory of what I'd done with it. Flushing, I ran a hand through my hair and looked everywhere but at the tiefling. "I guess I just got startled."

Valen stared at me a few beats longer. Then he shook his head, seeming to shake off some lingering bemusement in the process. "Well, if it is all the same to you, I cannot walk on air, so I think I will take the boat."

"I can't walk on air," I protested. I caught his look and shrugged awkwardly. "Not that far, anyway." I couldn't believe I'd actually done that. I supposed, like any new trick, I was going to have to practice this one until I got it under control, or else the next time somebody surprised me I was going to bounce off of the ceiling like a champagne cork. "Where are we going?"

Valen gave me an odd look. "Where you suggested we go. Unless you have changed your mind?"

My flush got a little deeper. I tried to gather the scattered pieces of my brain back together. I hadn't made this much of a fool of myself in a while. I was out of my depth, out of luck, and probably out of my gourd. "Right," I said, and coughed. "To the island of those surface elves. Guess we might as well go now." I was as ready as I'd ever be, and the sooner we got this over with, the happier I'd be. I sighed and followed the tiefling up the gangplank, pinning my eyes to the pauldrons of his armor to avoid making even more of a fool of myself by getting caught staring at his tail. At least I'd stopped jumping every time it twitched. "Who knows? With any luck, they'll be a little less freaky than our pilot."

* * *

The sickly sweet smell of trash and the nastier stench of middens wafted through the ruined streets. Water dripped. Feathers rustled. Strange echoes caught the murmur of voices, distorted them into moans.

The avariel city looked like it had taken a page from Undrentide's book and crash-landed, only in this case they'd gone all the way through to the Underdark. Many buildings were at least half-ruined, though a few of the larger ones still looked intact. I could even see the skeleton of streets and squares in the way the buildings were placed.

People – far too few – moved along the streets or sat in the buildings. Of those people, practically none of them paid us any mind, as if we were invisible to them as ghosts unless we spoke.

I passed a window where three avariel sat at a ruined table and sipped stagnant water from chipped china cups. Another doorway into what looked like a house showed a winged elven woman rocking an empty cradle and humming what sounded like a lullaby.

A group of avariel drifted by, their white-gold beauty shining even through the dark and whatever wrongness covered them. They were walking, their wings hanging inertly from their backs. I was no expert on what avariel should look like, but their wings looked kind of scraggly, and I was pretty sure the one guy shouldn't have been dragging his wingtip on the floor like that.

The avarial passed without looking at me, their faces eerily blank. I stepped over a pile of broken marble to let them by. It looked like it used to be the base of a column, one of several in a line. "Is it just me," I asked. "Or is there something very strange about this place?"

Valen drew up next to me. "Strange?" he echoed, poker-faced. "About a city full of winged elves living underground? No, not at all."

I turned. My eyes roamed over his face, looking for something to tell me whether or not he was serious – a twitch, a tic, any kind of tell at all, but his face was as blank as a wall. "Was that a joke?"

Was that a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth, or a trick of the light? "Was it?"

I stared at him. I'd opened my mouth to respond – though I wasn't sure with what – when a shrill voice cut across the cavern. "Hey, Boss?"

I pulled my eyes from Valen's face to look at the kobold. "Yeah, Deeks?"

Deekin clambered onto a fallen column and crouched there, wrapping his tail around the stone to steady himself. "Deekin read a story about a place like this," he said thoughtfully. "A long time ago. It be about a city of winged elves. Avariel city be high up in mountains, and everybody happy. Then one day-" He cupped his skinny hands together, then flung them wide. "Poof! Everything disappear."

Valen's armor clanked as he paced the street, vigilantly scanning for threats. The man never relaxed. It was as if he expected sudden war to break out right under his feet. "What? Everything disappear where?" he asked. He blinked. A scowl slashed across his face. "I mean, _disappeared_ where?"

Deekin shrugged. "Nobody know where, but legend say they go to darkest depths," he said.

I looked around. The elves had their underground city pretty well lit, but shadows pressed in thickly where their lights didn't reach. I felt a shudder run down my spine. The cavern ceiling was closer, here. Determinedly, I kept my eyes away from it, even though that didn't really help. I could still feel it pressing in on me, even though it had to be a good hundred feet up. "Can't get much darker and deeper than here, I suppose," I said. "Did your story say why they vanished?"

"Umm." Deekin scratched his snout. "Nope. Sorry. Story not say. It just say one day – poof!" The kobold threw his hands up in the air. "It not say one day – poof! – because such-and-such."

Valen's tail spasmed. "Will you stop saying that?" he snapped. "Or at least stop saying it so _loudly_?"

Deekin's beady eyes went innocently wide. "What?"

The tiefling's voice was flat. "Poof."

The kobold tsk'ed. "No, no, you gots to be more dramatic about it," he chided. "And make the hand gesture, for artistic flair. Like this." Scaled hands came together and then fluttered suddenly apart like a pair of startled pigeons. "Poof!"

A muscle in Valen's jaw twitched. "I shall do no such thing."

Deekin shrugged. "Your loss," he said cheerfully.

I tried to ignore them. Looking up, I saw a pale shape float down towards me, zig-zagging gently as it fell. I caught the feather, then made a startled little noise of disgust and dropped it, wiping my hand on my coat. The feather had been half-rotted, with pus and worse things crusted on its shaft.

I caught Valen watching me. "These people are not well," he observed.

Deekin picked up the feather, then made a face and dropped it just as I had. "Yeah, these people not be normal at all," he agreed.

I snorted. "What the hell would _you_ know about normal people, Deeks?"

"Read about 'em in a book, Boss."

"Oh. All righty, then." I looked around. Normalcy didn't seem to be in the offering around here, neither with the people nor the scenery. This was a city half-ruined from what looked like a direct nosedive into the Underdark from about four thousand feet, and its inhabitants were pale and sick and claiming, with the fixed and sweaty smiles of the coerced, that they loved this dank, dark hole, loved it right down to its little cotton socks. I lowered my voice. "You think they're under some kind of a…a curse or something?" I asked. I had no idea what or how that could be, but if my years in this world had taught me anything, it was that the seriously weird stuff only happened when magic got involved.

Valen nodded. "I suspect that there is powerful magic at work here. Of what kind, I cannot tell, but to transport an entire city and control the behavior of its residents would not seem to be a simple spell."

I sighed. "Great. Of course it wouldn't be simple."

The tiefling's voice was dry. "These things seldom are, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are trying to sell you something. Or kill you."

"Well, you're just a ray of sunshine, aren't you?"

"I try."

I put on a dry tone to match his. "Try harder." I hiked Enserric higher onto my shoulder and strolled on, following what looked like the remnants of a road. There was a gate across it, barely more than an arched doorway with half of its surrounding wall gone. I headed towards it. "I think we should-"

A hand grabbed me by one shoulder and stopped me short. "Do not," Valen warned.

I reeled, trying to regain my balance. "Don't what?"

Valen pointed at the doorway. "Never, _ever_ walk through strange doorways in the middle of nowhere," he said fervently.

I blinked. "Why not?" It was just a door.

I heard a sharp exhalation of disbelief. "Why not?" Valen echoed. He spread his hands in a helpless gesture, as if he were trying to explain that the sky was blue or that fire burned. "You simply do not do that. You have no idea where that doorway might lead."

I turned back to the doorway and looked through it. "Seems pretty clear to me," I said dubiously. "It leads to the next part of the sidewalk."

Valen stared at me for a few moments longer. Then he spun on his heel and stalked away, muttering to himself. I thought I caught the word 'prime', but that didn't clarify anything. Prime what? Prime steak? Prime real estate? Prime number?

I stared after him, confused as hell. Then I shrugged and sidestepped the doorway before walking on, since it seemed to give him so much grief. "Anyway," I went on stubbornly. "I think we should-"

A voice interrupted me. Again. This one sounded like it had a quill stuck up its nose. "Wielder. Attend me."

I stopped and sighed, glancing at the sword on my shoulder. "What now?"

"I am sensing life energies up ahead."

My blood congealed. "What?" The walls of some kind of canyon rose up ahead. My eyes darted, but there were too many shadows and I couldn't see a thing. "You're serious?"

"No, I thought I would tell a joke to lighten the mood. You may be about to walk into an ambush and die an agonizing death. Ha. Ha. Did I do that right?"

Uneasily, I slipped the sword down from my shoulder and flexed my fingers on its hilt, settling them into one of the grips Magda had taught me. "Not even remotely."

"Oh, I do beg your pardon." Enserric sounded about as remorseful as a hangman. "Well, there are several life forms ahead, regardless. I thought you should know. Now go away. I am trying to think." Then the red in the blade winked out abruptly, as if the sword had just slammed a door shut, or maybe just gone back to sleep.

I exchanged glances with Valen. The tiefling shrugged. "The Valsharess may have heard the same rumors that we did," he murmured, his voice low. "I would not be surprised to find that she has sent a force here to investigate, just as we have." A flash of red appeared in his eyes, for a moment. "And it seems that they have even decided to roll out the red carpet for us. That is an unfortunate mistake – for them."

Calling the three of us a force was optimistic to the point of insanity. I had a badly sarcasm-prone sword I didn't even know how to use and I was missing my lightning, Deekin had a crossbow and a few illusion spells, and I had no idea about Valen, but even if he really was as good as he seemed to think he was, he was only one person. Warily, I drew a few currents of wind into a wall. Thank God, between the size of the cavern and the movement of the Dark River through it, there was some air flow here. "What-"

Any question I'd been about to ask was answered, and then some, by the whistle of arrows flying out of the dark canyon.

The arrows hit my wall. Some of them just dropped. Others bounced. A few were spun around and went zipping back the way they'd come. I heard a couple of thunks and screams. Shapes materialized in the gloom at the bottom of the canyon. They looked like drow.

I heard a heavy metallic rattle. Valen shook his flail out. Its head fell as heavy as a comet. "Keep those arrows off of me," he ordered, and without another word, he darted into the fray, his hair streaming out behind him like a crimson banner.

I took a half-step after him, my hand outstretched. "But-" The tiefling crashed into the drow. Somebody screamed. It didn't sound like him, but in the sudden whirlwind of motion, I couldn't be sure. "Oh, shit." I looked up. The drow had chosen the choke point of a narrow canyon between two huge rocky outcroppings as their ambush site, and I could see shapes moving on the heights. I drew in a sharp breath and threw down another wall between the tiefling below and the drow above. Another flight of arrows hissed and thudded against it. It held. That, at least, I could do.

Now to actually deal with the archers. My hand dipped into my potions pouch and came out with a chokepowder flask. I aimed, wound up my arm, and threw. The flask crashed against the rocks underneath the feet of one group of archers, up on the eastern bluff. Yellow smoke rose, and bolts stopped coming from that quarter, at least for the time being.

Then I drew in another breath, willing the wind into me. The world seemed to slow down. "Shoot those archers, I'll get the others," I told Deekin, my voice suddenly sounding drawn-out and far too deep, and before my words had even finished I made for the cliffside.

There was a narrow path up, twisting and rocky. I followed it, unnaturally fleet-footed, Enserric in hand for whatever good it would do me. I'd seen some drow by the edge – _there, two of them,_ I thought as I cleared the last rise, and shifted Enserric to my left hand while I pointed my right at the first drow I saw. "HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!" I bellowed, putting all the force I could into it. Miracle of miracles, this time it worked, and he froze in place. I grabbed Enserric in both hands and swung gracelessly, gasping as the sword bit right through the drow's armor and under his ribs and a chill washed through me. My command must have frozen my opponent's vocal cords, too, because he didn't make a sound, even as I leaned back and kicked him off the blade.

I didn't stop to make sure he was dead, but went after the next one I saw, twisting both of my hands around on Enserric's hilt to get a more comfortable grip, one hand near the pommel and the other near the crosspiece.

The drow saw me coming, dropped his crossbow, and ducked beneath my first swing, which whooshed harmlessly over his head. He had a longsword, and his counter banged Enserric back, sending me bunny-hopping backwards in order to catch my balance and avoid falling.

 _Crap_ , I thought. The last time I'd tried to fight with Enserric, I'd been in a panic. This time, I was just calm enough to realize how much trouble I was really in.

The drow got his feet, and I realized I had to close with him or he was going to get that little hand crossbow loaded and aimed and then offloaded into my chest, and my scales weren't likely to stop a bolt. I surged forward, swinging. The shock of impact quivered up my arms as his longsword took advantage of my clumsy swing and slapped Enserric down. I followed the momentum down, and a moment later I was pretty sure I had Drogan's training and a couple years of combat experience to thank for the fact that I still had a head, because it was thanks to them that I grasped where the drow's next swipe would go and I managed to throw myself down right before his sword whistled through the air where my neck used to be.

My shoulder hit the ground. I rolled onto my back, trying to catch my breath. The same instincts I'd somehow developed over the past few years kept Enserric in my hands and angled him across my torso to protect it. A second later, I saw steel coming at me and twisted Enserric somehow so the other guy's blade _shing_ 'ed down mine. Its point hit the ground near my head, striking sparks. I swung up and over my head awkwardly, the angle all wrong to get any real force behind it, and managed to knock the drow's sword away, but that left me on my back and exposed and, I was pretty sure, in serious trouble.

The drow raised his sword to come at me again, then stopped at the sound of an approaching scream. "YAAAHOOOOO!" a familiar voice shrieked. "Onwards, noble steed!" There was a skittering sound, followed by a thunk. The drow stiffened, his face going blank. Fletching bloomed in his forehead like a grisly flower, and without a noise, he pitched forward and onto me, his sword dropping from nerveless fingers.

I shoved the body off of me. "Fuck," I gasped. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, tasting blood on my lips. I spat. The shakes were starting to hit. I fought them back, or tried to. I could still hear fighting. It wasn't over yet. I couldn't freak out yet. I rolled. Then I froze. "What the hell is that thing?" I yelled, freaking out.

Deekin grinned at me from his perch on something with too many legs, too many eyes, and altogether too much ugly. "It be Deekin's new friend! Deekin sang a little song, asking for friends to help him, and it came running." He patted the thing's hairy thorax. "You like it?"

I stared at Deekin's new friend. A violent shudder went through me, making all of my hair stand on end. "C-could I think about that and get back to you?"

The kobold clucked to his horrible eight-legged mount. "Just ignore her, Noble Steed," he crooned to it as it lurched past me. "Deekin still loves you." The kobold and his spider reached the edge of the cliff, where Deekin dismounted, put his back to a handy boulder, and peeked over the edge, cranking his crossbow. "There still be some nasty drow down there," he said, and pointed. "Get 'em, spidey!"

The spider clicked its mandibles once. Then it bunched its legs and boinged over the cliff. Below, I heard a scream. It sounded elven. I hoped it was. I really hoped, for all our sakes, that Deekin hadn't just dropped a mastiff-sized spider on Valen's head.

I joined the Deekin behind his rock, peering past it. "What's going on down there? How many are left? Where's Valen? Is he okay?"

Deekin twisted around, peered over the edge of the ridge, and fired straight down. "Umm." He reared back, blinking. "Yeah. Goat-man be fine."

I heaved a sigh of relief. "Great. What's he doing now? He need help?"

The kobold reloaded and leaned over to look. "He…uh." I saw the tip of his tail crook in surprise. "Oopsie. He just threw his flail at a drow, so he, uh, not gots a weapon at the moment…"

I scrambled to my feet, ready to jump over the edge and just hope I didn't land on anybody's sword. I had no affection for the man, but that didn't mean I wanted him to die – or that I wanted to tell the Seer I'd gotten her bodyguard killed. "What?"

Without looking, Deekin reached back and flapped his hand at me in a 'sit down' motion. "Never mind. He be fine now."

I settled back a little. "Good."

"Yeah, he just picked up a drow and used her to hit some other drow. It all good."

My mouth formed a silent 'oh'.

Deekin kept up his stream of real-time reports. "Aaand now he gots his weapon back." He flinched. "Ooh. That had to hurt."

I had to see this. I craned around to look. "What's he-" Words died on my tongue. I blinked.

Valen was surrounded by bodies, or almost. One drow was still standing, a woman in red. She made a feint and then a stab which the tiefling somehow caught on his bracer and turned aside so fast I couldn't quite see what had happened. Then both of his hands were back on the flail and he sent its spiked heads barreling towards her with a practiced, precise swing.

Still, at first I thought the tiefling had missed because the flail whistled past the side of his opponent's head by inches, but then he did _something_ that made the flail turn in mid-flight so that it spun around the drow's head and then back towards its owner again, its chain forming a rattling collar around the drow's neck, and then Valen's shoulders heaved and he gave the flail a powerful twist and a yank and…

I dropped down behind the rock again, my hands over my mouth. My stomach churned. "How did he do that?" I shrieked into my hands.

Deekin dropped down next to me. "Wow. Neat. Deekin had no idea you could do that with a flail."

I swallowed hard. "You mean behead someone?"

"Yeah. That." Deekin turned. "Coast looks clear. Only person still standing is goat-man."

I stood. My legs felt wobbly and my voice sounded faint. "Fine. I think I'll take the shortcut. Meet you downstairs, Deeks." Then I stepped off the cliff.

It wasn't that much of a fall in the first place, and gravity forgot about me about halfway down, or maybe it was more accurate to say that gravity and the wind had an argument and the wind, acting on orders from higher up, won.

I settled gently to the ground a few feet away from Valen, sending a silent prayer of thanks to Shaundakul for, once again, not letting me go splat.

The tiefling spun at the scrape of my boots against stone, his weapon upraised and body coiled like a spring. His flail made an ungodly noise as the head spun loose, and his eyes flashed red as coals for half a second.

Half a second was about how long it took me to jump backwards and raise my hands. "Whoa!" I exclaimed. "Settle down. It's just me."

Valen blinked, and the red tinge abruptly left his eyes. His flail clinked as he lowered it, breathing hard. " _Never_ startle me like that," he snapped. He straightened slowly from his fighting crouch and sucked in another couple of what looked like calming breaths. When he spoke again, his voice was mild, for him, which meant it still had a smoky, dangerous little edge to it but wasn't immediately life-threatening. "Please."

Well, at least he'd said please. And hadn't murdered me, which was a nice plus. "Sorry. I'll try to make more noise next time." I'd hire a jazz trio to follow us around the Underdark if that was what it took to settle Valen's nerves. That hideous weapon of his had popped a woman's head right off of her neck like a grape off of its stem, and I kind of liked my head where it was.

The tiefling winced and looked away. "There is no need for you to apologize," he said stiffly. His ears were red. "You could not have known." He looked back. A strange expression suffused his face. "Ah…my lady?"

I scowled at him. "What is it this time, sunshine?" The tiefling pointed wordlessly at my feet. I looked down. "Oh, hell," I said, my voice disgusted. "Not again." I stepped down onto solid ground. I hadn't just jumped backwards when Valen rounded on me, I'd apparently jumped about a foot upwards as well. "Well, it looks like you're not the only one who doesn't react well to surprises."

That strange expression hadn't budged. "Perhaps you should-"

Whatever he thought I should do, it was drowned out in an almost ear-splitting shriek. "Boss!" The kobold appeared around the bend, accelerating rapidly until he barreled into my knees, flinging his arms around them. "You almost stopped little Deekin's heart! Why you not tell me you could do that? Deekin thought you were about to go splat!"

I blinked and wobbled. "Oops. Sorry." I seemed to be apologizing a lot lately. "I thought you knew."

Two beady black eyes stared up at me disapprovingly. "No. And now Deekin gotta go have a lie-down because his poor heart went kablooie."

I flushed and patted the kobold's shoulder awkwardly. "Uh. Yeah. Sorry, sweetie. I should've warned you." I looked up to find Valen staring at us both, his expression now thoroughly bemused. I shrugged and offered a crooked smile. "It's a perk of the job. Windwalkers might fall, but we don't hit the ground." Except for when we fell out of favor, or for when we asked Shaundakul to let us go because the alternative was to survive the fall while our friends all died, and that was no real alternative.

Valen finally blinked. Then he shrugged, as if he'd just decided to add my apparent immunity to gravity to his mental list of 'normal' things and move on. "Very well. I will keep that in mind," he said, his inflection so wooden you could have started a bonfire with it. He gave me a quick once-over, head to toe. "Are you unharmed?"

I ran down a mental checklist. All body parts were present, with the possible exception of my brain, and my liver probably wasn't in great shape, either. "Fine. You?"

He shrugged. "Unhurt."

"I'm not surprised," I said. I tried not to look at the pile of bodies. My best guess was that there were close to a dozen. "That was…pretty amazing." Amazing didn't even begin to cover it. The man was massive blunt force trauma on two legs.

The expression that crossed Valen's face then _was_ a smile – it wasn't a trick of the light this time, but a smile, slight and as quick as the flicker of a candle, but there. "Thank you," he said. His tail swayed back and forth in a way that I might almost have called 'pleased' and in a way I was trying really, really hard not to think of as 'wagging'. "And thank you for taking care of the archers."

I found myself looking at my boots, and switched my gaze to the corpses instead, as if I were studying them for clues. "You're welcome." Then I frowned. "Wait. She's wearing red." I knelt near the headless corpse, gagging slightly at the ruin of her head. Valen hadn't just removed it, he'd annihilated it. There was bone, and blood, and white stuff, and gray stuff, and…. _Ugh. Just don't look._ I averted my eyes, scanning her armor instead. It was red, like that assassin had worn when she'd come to kill me in the Yawning Portal. "A Red Sister," I said softly.

Valen crouched easily on the other side of the body, his tail hovering behind him as if for balance. "We can call this confirmation, then, that these people were sent by the Valsharess," he said. "No surprise there."

I ran my eyes over the body. Something flickered beneath her limp hand. Gingerly, I lifted her arm by its sleeve and slipped the object out from underneath it with my free hand, then held the little flickering thing up in front of my face. A jagged sliver of my own reflection looked back at me. "A piece of mirror," I said. I turned the shard over in my fingers. There was nothing special about it that I could see. "Why was she carrying around a broken piece of mirror?"

"Maybe she be really pretty and like to look at herself a lot?" Deekin offered.

Valen glanced towards the corpse's head, or what was left of it. "Not anymore," he deadpanned.

I started to laugh, looked at the drow's splattered skull, gagged a little in mid-inhale, and ended up just going into a sustained fit of coughing. "Okay," I said, when I could breathe again. I wiped my eyes, and I was almost positive I was a terrible person for laughing at something so grisly. "Don't lie to me. That was _definitely_ a joke."

Valen stood. His tail flicked once, but his face gave nothing away. "Was it?"

I stood, too, and pocketed the little piece of mirror. "Yes," I said firmly. Valen didn't answer, which I took as confirmation. Maybe he did have a sense of humor after all, even if it was so black it practically had an event horizon. Shaking myself, I scanned the carnage and sighed. "I guess we'd better check the bodies for anything useful." I hated this part, but I'd learned the necessity of it. If nothing else, these guys would probably have potions and medical supplies that might save our asses some day. "Then let's get going. We need to figure out what's going on here."

Deekin bobbed his head. The little scavenger was already, I noticed, going through one of the corpse's pockets, because of course he was. "Yeah," he agreed. "Before the bad drow lady sends more people."

Valen spared Deekin an assessing glance before bending to the grisly work. "For once, kobold," the tiefling muttered. "You speak sense."


	25. Tower

A/N: Bit of a palate cleanser after that last long chapter. Enjoy.:)

* * *

 _I'll be your nightmare mirror  
_ _Do what you do to me  
_ _I'll be your nightmare mirror  
_ _Colder than a steel blade_

\- Katzenjammer, "Demon Kitty Rag"

~*~  
Chapter 25: Tower  
~*~

The mage's tower was a slender spire sheathed in white quartz. It must have been a hell of a sight in its mountain home, sparkling in the sunlight and glowing in the moonlight. In the Underdark, it just looked pathetically out of place.

The massive front door was ajar. I craned my neck to look up at the lintel as we passed underneath it. "How about this door?" I asked Valen, my voice bright as a daisy. "Is this door okay? Can we go through this door?"

The tiefling wore a hounded glower. "Stop that," he growled. His armor clanked as his shoulders gave an irritated little hitch. "Or the next time you try to walk through a portal to who-knows-where, I shall not stop you." His voice lowered to a mutter. "With my luck, it will lead straight into Pandemonium, and I will finally lose what is left of my mind."

I blinked. "What's Pandemonium?"

"A place of chaos so absolute that anyone who goes there goes mad in moments." Valen's voice went deadpan. "If I did not know better, I would take you for a native."

I stopped dead, putting my hands on my hips. "Did you just call me insane?"

"No."

"Oh. Well, that's goo-"

"I am saying that you drive _other_ people insane."

I stared at him. His expression was decidedly put-upon, and just a little sullen. "This is about the door thing, isn't it? Jeez, Valen, I was only teasing-"

A brief growl rumbled in his throat. "I would like you to stop. My lady."

I sighed. Getting this guy to smile was an impossible task, anyway, and not worth the effort. "All right, sunshine. I'll stop."

"Good. Thank you." Valen's voice was short, and he stalked to the center of the entrance hall without another word.

Claws scraped on the quartz floor next to me, making a noise not unlike nails on a chalkboard. "Hey, Boss?" Deekin said. "You remember all those times you said you not like to live dangerously?"

I watched Valen. The hall was lit by magelights, placed seemingly at random, and the uneven lighting reflected strangely on his horns, highlighting their graceful backwards sweep of bone. The overall effect was weirdly regal, with emphasis on the weird part. "Yeah, Deeks?"

"Well, Deekin been thinking about it, and he be almost positive you were lying."

Valen's head turned. He was frowning, and seemed to be sniffing the air. "Do you smell that?"

I frowned and sniffed, too. "I don't-" I paused and wrinkled my nose. "Actually, yeah. It smells a little like rotten eggs. What is that?" I looked down and put on a mock-chiding tone. "Deeks? Have you been eating dried fruit again?"

The kobold's sharp little teeth gleamed. "No way, Boss. This time Deekin be innocent of any smelly wrongdoings, he swears."

"Unlike all the other times, you mean."

"Well, yeah. But it not be nice to talk about those."

"It was even less nice to live through 'em."

"Sorry, Boss."

Valen had gone still, his stance tense and eyes raking every inch of the hall. He inhaled again, deeply, and then his flail was in his hands, its head swinging freely. "Brimstone," he said flatly. "Watch yourselves. There are demons here."

My head swiveled, searching. Enserric came off of my shoulder. "You can tell just by the smell?"

Valen's mouth twisted. "Trust me. I know what the Abyss smells like."

Deekin tittered. "Yeah! It smells abysmal! Ha!"

Valen's face went stiff. "I am not even going to dignify that with an answer."

The kobold's face scrunched up. "But…you just did?"

I shook my head sharply. "Quiet, you two." That smell was getting stronger, and I was getting edgier. I beckoned Valen closer and leaned in, placing my lips close to his pointed ear. I couldn't help but notice that he had a notch in it, about halfway up, as if it had once ended up on the wrong side of a knife. "You think somebody here might be summoning demons?" I whispered.

The tiefling went very still. He turned his head very slightly, as if considering my words, but didn't go so far as to look at me. "Most likely. Demons and devils generally cannot cross into this plane unless they are called."

I stiffened. "What do you mean, 'generally'? I was taught they couldn't come here at all."

The tiefling snorted. "Then whoever told you that was lying to you - or a fool. Erinyes exist to tempt mortals, and can cross into the Prime to do it. On top of that, many baatezu will try to trick mortals into calling them, so subtly that the mortal may not even know what they have done."

My lips tightened. I didn't appreciate this guy calling Drogan a fool, but I didn't dare risk an argument, just in case it might attract the attention of something horrible. That horrible things might be lurking, I had no doubt. This place was all tangled up and twisted, a place where the town wizard abandoned his craft and left his tower to his bumbling apprentice, who apparently thought it might be fun to summon horrible creatures from the Abyss.

Unfortunately, running away wasn't an option. If the owner of this tower was to be believed, that piece of broken glass we'd found on the dead Red Sister was part of the magic mirror that had started all this, and his apprentice had locked himself at the top of the tower with another piece. I didn't know why the mirror was important, but I was operating on the assumption that if the Valsharess wanted something, it was probably a good idea to make sure she didn't get it.

Valen moved away, exploring. After a minute, his voice drifted softly across the stone hall. "Stairs. Over here."

The stairs were past a narrow doorway, winding up the tower's wall. The tiefling led the way. I followed. I figured it was a good idea to let the mithril-encased wrecking ball go first, especially since he seemed to know a lot more about demons than I did.

The next floor opened into library stacks, rows on rows of bookshelves so tall and thickly filled that you could barely see through them. Our footsteps were muffled on rich carpets. A few steps in, I felt something squish underfoot. I looked down and took my foot away hurriedly, shuddering. A sad pile of feather, bone, and scraps of flesh were all that was left of some kind of hawk, and when I looked, there were more little lumps like that all over the floor. It looked like this place used to be an aviary as much as a library, only someone had come in and torn the residents to pieces.

I sniffed. The sulfur smell had gotten stronger, and with it was another smell that I could only call the smell of putrefaction.

Somewhere among the bookshelves, a heavy step thudded to the ground. Along with it came a sound like feathers and a hoarse, chittering squawk. The squawk was answered by another, and then a third. They sounded like birds, only birds never got that big.

Valen's hand on my shoulder kept me still – not that I had any intention of going anywhere except possibly right back down the stairs. Valen had gone still, too, although his face was oddly calm, as if finding himself in a corpse-strewn library with giant carnivorous birds stalking the stacks was normal for him. It was his turn to lean over and whisper in my ear. "Vrocks," he said, so softly I had to strain to hear him. "Stupid and hard-of-hearing, but deadly. Do not let their spores touch you."

I nodded infinitesimally. So the giant carnivorous birds shot deadly spores. _Lovely,_ I thought. _Remind me again why I keep getting myself into these situations?_ Maybe Deekin was right. Maybe I really did like living dangerously.

We hovered by the door, hidden behind a laden bookshelf, and listened as the vrocks browsed. Valen's quick assessment of the situation and call for a halt seemed to have bought us time. The vrocks didn't seem to have noticed us yet. My eyes ran over the shelves next to me. They were big but airy and looked like they'd been placed on the floor, not built into it. From the looks of them, a good, hard shove might take one down.

At the sight of the shelves, a memory emerged from a long-ago alcoholic haze. It was a memory of a party, one that had started at my friend Jeff's apartment, moved on to a late night library break-in on a dare, and ended with a hungover visit to the dean's office, where words like 'hoodlums' and 'suspension' had featured prominently. I leaned towards Valen. "How do vrocks feel about books?" I whispered.

The tiefling shot me a perplexed and slightly annoyed look. "Books?" he mouthed.

I nodded and backed away from the shelves until my back hit the wall. Then I made a shoving motion towards the stacks. "Books," I mouthed back.

Valen's expression stayed quizzical for a few seconds longer. Then it cleared in sudden understanding, and a fierce almost-smile played around his lips before he moved to stand beside me, his back to the wall. He caught my eye and raised an eyebrow expectantly, as if waiting for me to say 'when'.

I held my hand out, three fingers upraised and my thumb and pinky folded. _Three._ I folded my ring finger. _Two._ I folded my middle finger, leaving me with just my forefinger upraised. _And…_

As soon as I'd folded my last finger down, the tiefling and I both catapulted ourselves off the wall and body-slammed the shelves like a couple of drunken frat boys, which was pretty much how it had gone down that night in the library, too.

The shelf rocked under our combined weight, and for one breathless moment, I thought we'd just made a whole lot of noise for nothing.

Then, slowly at first but gathering speed as it went, the shelf began to topple.

The first shelf hit the second, which fell a little faster, and then it hit the third which quickly took down the fourth and then the library was filled with the crashing of wholesale furniture destruction, punctuated by the hail-like thuds of a thousand books hitting the floor.

Somewhere in the stacks, something let out a noise like a chicken that had just been stepped on, only louder, bigger, and way, way angrier. One of the vrocks was limp, its neck at an unnatural angle.

I realized that, in a complete abandonment of anything remotely resembling good sense, I was laughing. "Look at me! I'm fighting evil with books!" I shouted. "Hah! And Mrs. Flannigan said I didn't know how to behave in a library!"

Valen stared. "I cannot believe it," he said. "That actually worked."

Then, as if in response to our words, the stacks heaved, and something hideous rose out of them, showering broken-spined books and splintered shelves.

The vrock looked like a vulture, if a vulture had been stretched to about eight feet of impossibly emaciated limbs and sunken ribs. Its feathers were patchy, and where its skin was visible, it was discolored and riddled with oozing sores. The thing looked sick, but it didn't look like sickness had slowed it any. It was also hissing like a teakettle. Its head swung, and eyes like bonfires fell on me. Also, its wing was hanging limp and at a weird angle, as if broken.

On second thought, maybe I was going to need a lot more than books for this one. I backed away. My shoulder blades hit stone. "Oh, crap. Literary critic, incoming."

Valen's flail snapped free. "On it," he said. Then more vrocks popped out of the wreckage – another, and another still – and Valen was leaping over the broken shelving, his flail already thundering through the air.

I ducked behind the nearest column. I heard some savage thuds as the tiefling's flail met flesh, and the banging of cymbals as Deekin started some off-key chant, and I felt perfectly useless. Those vrock things had both reach and weight on me, and maybe if I'd had Silent Partner I could have used its length to keep them at bay and its enchantment to shock them sorry, but Silent Partner was gone and I didn't trust myself or Enserric enough to take him into a fight with eight-foot-tall demonic vultures.

Metal tore into flesh and ruptured bone, vrocks shrieked, and I watched as another vrock crawled out of the ruined stacks, shook its tattered wings, sighted me, and cracked its beak open. Sparks danced on its blue-black tongue.

I felt the electricity build as the vrock's spell took shape. "Down!" I shouted, and threw myself to the floor without waiting to see if anyone listened.

A jagged blue-white light flashed overhead. My skin tingled, my hair crackled, and when I rolled onto my back I realized that I could _see_ the lingering traceries of energy still dancing in the air above me, remnants of the bolt the vrock had hurled.

My heart leapt. I breathed in, feeling power kindle and flash to life in my chest. _There._ My hand closed on a handful of sparks and then lightning was spurting out between my fingers. I didn't know how I held it, didn't know how it wasn't hurting me, but it writhed and jerked in my hand like a caged tiger, so I rose up and twisted and let it go, launching the living energy like a spear.

The lightning bolt split the air with a thunderous crack and flashed towards the vrock. Just before the lightning hit, the demon-bird spread its wings and opened its beak as if in welcome.

Then the world seemed to _twist_ in a fundamentally weird way, and the vrock vanished in a puff of multicolored smoke.

I scrambled to my feet, my eyes searching frantically. They fell on a small white shape which was standing where the vrock once stood. It fixed me with a mad little eye and clucked.

Valen bashed the last vrock's head in and spun, his eyes flaring red. "What happened?" he demanded. "That felt like a wild magic surge!" His eyes settled on the little white bird. "And what in the festering pits of Shedaklah is _tha_ t?"

I blinked, hard. Nope – I hadn't been seeing things. "I, uh. I think it's a chicken."

Then, almost before I finished the sentence, the chicken went cross-eyed, squawked, and vanished in a puff of white and red.

Valen stared. "Interesting," he said. He lowered his flail. "I have never seen a vrock do _that_ before."

Deekin clambered over a fallen bookcase. He was surrounded by a ghostly nimbus of light, and his crossbow drooped from his fingers. "What the _krzzk_ just happened?" he yelped.

"The vrock turned into a chicken," I said, my voice distant. I plucked a floating feather out of the air, looked at it, and dropped it. "And then it exploded."

There was a strange, erratic little snorting noise from Valen. I turned to find the tiefling staring studiously at the wall, his back to me. His shoulders were shaking slightly. "Valen, are you all right?" I asked.

Valen cleared his throat and turned back to me, his face blank. "Absolutely. Do not be concerned." He looked around speculatively. "You should be careful about using magic here, however," he added. "Unless I miss my guess, that was a wild magic surge. Any spell you try to cast may go…" One corner of his lips twitched slightly before ratcheting back down into the usual grim line. "…dramatically awry." His eyes went to my hair, and his hand raised a little, pointing somewhat diffidently. "You have a-"

I reached up and pulled a white feather out of my hair. "Oh. Uh. Thanks." I ran my hands over my hair and looked for a mirror. There were none. "Are there any more of them on me?"

Valen shook his head. Then, before I could say anything further, he jumped to the floor from his perch on the bookcase, sticking his landing as lightly and neatly as a gymnast. "Let's keep moving," he said briskly. "Our quarry is most likely at the top of the tower, and I would like this mirror to be safely in our hands before the Valsharess can send reinforcements."

I searched his face. He'd been laughing at that vrock's strange demise, I was sure of it. Snickering, anyway. "Lead on," I said, and fell in behind him, staring thoughtfully at his mithril-clad back.

There was a single wood-and-iron door at the top of the stairs. We all crowded onto the landing. I reached out to try the knob when a set of long, thin reptilian fingers latched around my wrist with surprising strength. "Watch it, Boss," Deekin whispered. "See that wire? Right there along the edge?"

I looked where he was pointing. Then I took my hand away from the knob. "I'm gonna have you scout all the doors from now on, little buddy," I muttered. Drogan had even taught me how to spot these things. I'd just never been much good at it, or maybe I just wasn't much good at paying attention. "Can you disarm it?"

The kobold was already pulling a roll of obscure little metal tools from his pack. "Easy peasy," he chirped, and went to work. A minute and a few careful snips later, the wire was hanging loose. The kobold tried the doorknob. "Er. Whoops. It be locked. That gonna be a little trickier. Deekin not so good with locks."

Valen motioned us aside. "Step back, please."

I stepped back and looked at him curiously. "What are you gonna do?"

The tiefling smirked. "I am going to knock." He snapped his flail loose. Then he swung it at the door. The flail punched through the wood in a shower of splinters. One punch opened up a hole. Two punches opened up the entire doorway.

Light streamed through the broken door. Valen stepped to one side, held out a hand, and gave me a slight bow. "Your door," he said, in a way that I was pretty sure was meant to be mocking, even if his face didn't give much indication either way. "My lady."

In spite of myself, I looked admiringly at the tiefling's handiwork. "Wow. When you knock on a door, it stays knocked."

"Thank you. I think."

I grinned and stepped through the ravaged doorframe. "You're welcome, sunshine."

I could almost hear his teeth grinding. "Will you _kindly_ stop calling me that?"

"Sure thing, sunshine," I drawled. "Just as soon as you stop calling me a lady." No response came, which I supposed was a response, of a kind.

We walked into the room. It looked like an office slash bedroom, complete with bookcases and a heavy desk, but it was the big four poster bed which seemed to be seeing the most use right then, because it held a couple of very naked avariel who looked like they'd recently been busy playing the beast with two backs and, in their case, four wings.

At least one of the bed's occupants must have heard Valen knocking, because just as we were crunching over the remains of their door, there was a startled exclamation. I caught a glimpse of white wings and a skinny white ass tumbling off an ivory-skinned knockout with the body of an international porn star.

The man hit the floor. The woman sat up. She was blonde and blue-eyed and stunning, and when she saw us she laughed. "My, my. What is this?" she asked. Her lips parted, and I saw her draw in air through delicately pointed teeth. "A-ha! I thought I smelled tanar'ri." She eyed Valen, and her smile widened. "Oh, _you_ are far better sport than this dull and sickly creature," she purred, and she twisted around to face us fully, her wings curving around her not so much to conceal her body as to draw attention to what they were just barely hiding. Her grin would have melted steel. "Would you like to play with me, fiendling?"

Valen's face had gone so tight that a muscle in his jaw twitched. "I know what you are," he spat. His posture was tense, his flail was at the ready, and red had started to rim his blue irises. "Begone, succubus. I shall have nothing to do with your kind."

The woman laughed. "Oh, so you are one of _those_ tieflings? Even more delicious." She wriggled forward and swung her legs over the edge of the bed one at a time, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination in the process, with the possible exception of where she'd gotten such a flawless bikini wax _._ Then she crossed her legs demurely and leaned back on her hands, kicking her foot playfully and eyeing Valen from beneath her lashes. "I wonder. What will it take to make you give in to the call of your blood?"

The tiefling's nostrils flared. "I will die first."

A disheveled blond head popped over the edge of the bed. The face revealed was thin and flushed. "Mahalath!" the other avariel cried. "Mahalath, I command you!"

The woman on the bed rolled her eyes. "How tiresome," she sighed. Her voice became a bored singsong, and she answered without looking over her shoulder. "Yes, my summoner?"

The man stood, although maybe it would have been better to call him a boy. Elves all looked young to me, but this one made it look like the lady was seriously robbing the cradle. "Begone, Mahalath," he ordered in a light tenor. "I have said your name three times, and by it I abjure you to begone."

The woman rolled her eyes again. "Oh, very well. As you command, my summoner." She stood languidly, running her hands over her hair, and where her hands touched her hair it turned from blonde to black as if her fingers were pouring ink over the strands. She blinked, and I saw the blue drain away from her eyes, replaced with unrelieved black, and a negligent shrug of her shoulders shook the white feathers from her wings, turning them black and leathery and batlike. When she was done, even her body had changed, losing the delicate slenderness of an elf and gaining nonstop curves. "I suppose we can continue our discussion later." She winked salaciously at Valen. "Farewell, mortal." Then she vanished with a soft pop, leaving nothing but empty air where she'd been standing.

I stared, torn between laughing at the craziness of the scene or diving straight out of the nearest window. I settled for staying where I was but plucking at the collar of my shirt to disperse a little heat. I had no idea what had just happened, but I was pretty sure I was going to need a cold shower after that, or at least a couple minutes of privacy. I wouldn't need much time. That succubus had radiated sex like a supernova.

The elf boy yanked a sheet from his bed and wrapped it around himself, flushing. "How dare you interrupt me!" he seethed. He looked at his door. "And why have you defaced my property?"

I looked over my shoulder, then turned back to the elf. "Sorry," I said. "That was Valen. He has a complicated relationship with doors."

The elf stared at me, his face outraged. "Insolence!" His fingers begin to move in the spidery gestures of magic. "Whoever you are, I shall teach you-"

I heard a soft growl from Valen. "Bar that," the tiefling said. Then he reached for a nearby bookshelf, pulled out a book seemingly at random, and then, with a practiced flick of his wrist, threw it at the elf.

The book pegged the elf-boy right in the forehead. He stopped in mid-chant, gave a weird little sigh, and slithered to the floor with a rustle of silk sheets and a faint thump.

In the silence that followed, I heard a familiar, scratchy little giggle. "Wow," Deekin said. "Good job, goat-man. You really threw the book at him."

Without looking, Valen pointed a finger at the kobold. "Please get that creature away from me. I cannot deal with him right now."

I swallowed a laugh and looked at Valen's face. It was tense and even more pale than usual, and although it was hard to tell from this angle, I thought his eyes still had a dull red sheen, which seemed to be a thing that happened when he got worked up. I placed a hand on Deekin's shoulders. "Why don't we go look for that mirror shard, Deeks?" I suggested brightly, and steered him away before he could answer.

The mirror shard was in a trunk beneath a window that had probably once looked out on a beautiful mountain scene, but now looked out onto darkness and rocks. To the west, I saw a turreted building with the look of a palace, and next to it a white marble colonnade that looked like it belonged to a temple. Turning away from the view, I gathered both shards into a little square of cloth and pocketed it carefully. "I think we're done here," I said to no one in particular. "Why don't we go downstairs and get some fresh air? Relatively speaking."

Valen drew in a breath, squared his shoulders, and nodded. "Thank you," he said quietly, without looking at me. "The air in here is…unpleasant."

He had that right. The chamber smelled like sex, rotten eggs, and musty books. It was not a winning combination. "Let's go. I thought I saw a library down the road. Maybe they'll have some answers."

Little needlelike teeth showed for a moment in Deekin's grimace. "The way the rest of these avariel be acting? Don't count on it, Boss."


	26. Disease

_I can see inside you, the sickness is rising_  
 _Don't try to deny what you feel_  
 _It seems that all that was good has died  
_ _And is decaying in me_

\- Disturbed, "Down With the Sickness"

~*~  
Chapter 26: Disease  
~*~

A stream of elven curses chased us out of the cave.

Deekin scampered up a rock a safe distance away before stopping, turning, and looking back. "Wow," he said. "Are queens supposed to be like that? She be almost as catank…canker…grumpy as you, boss."

I pulled a handkerchief out of a belt pouch and dabbed a few droplets of queenly spittle off of my chest. "Thanks for that glowing review, Deeks."

Valen moved past me warily, his eyes searching the shadows. From the way his shoulders lost a little of their stiffness, he didn't sense any threats, although he didn't relax his vigilance any. "You do have an unusually colorful vocabulary for a noblewoman," he pointed out before appending his usual, grudging, "My lady."

I wondered if the Seer would mind if I tied her favorite bodyguard's tail in a neat little bow. And then strangled him with it. "For the last time, I'm not a lady," I said from between clenched teeth.

Valen cocked his head at me. A lock of loose hair fell across his cheek, a sudden and vivid streak of crimson against alabaster. He swiped it out of the way almost absent-mindedly. "The Seer believes that you are. Is she mistaken?"

His face was unreadable, but the very tip of his tail was twitching in that cat-at-an-aviary-window kind of way again, and his eyes were intent on my face. "In other words, you want to know whether I'm lying," I concluded.

He frowned slightly. "That is not what I said."

"You didn't have to." _Your tail did the talking for you._ That thing was turning out to be as good as a weathervane for predicting his moods. Just a shame his moods were so often bad. It was practically the first time he'd spoken since we left the tower, and it had to be more of this? "I used to be an heiress," I said shortly. Maybe a little honest disclosure would shut him up. Besides, at least he was talking again. "I'm not anymore, because I got tired of being the black sheep of the family and left. Okay? That clear enough for you?"

"Ah." The tiefling hesitated. The edges of his ears turned slightly pink. "Actually. No. What does 'black sheep of the family' mean?"

I blinked, my irritation fading into confused surprise. I knew people in this world used that phrase – I'd heard them use it. How had he not heard of it? "Oh, uh. It means..." I thought about it. "It means the one who doesn't fit in with the others. Doesn't, you know, look or act the way they're supposed to."

Valen's face cleared. "Ah. Like an Indep among Hardheads. That does make sense."

I stared at him. "Okay," I said slowly. "Now it's my turn to have no idea what you just said."

The tiefling made a dismissive gesture. "The details are not important. Both sayings mean the same thing, if I am understanding you correctly," he said. He looked around. "But we should move on. This is getting nothing done."

He was right, even if he was evading the question. I clammed up and led the way back down the winding path to the city proper.

Deekin hadn't been exaggerating by much. Shaori, the avariel queen, had been holed up in a cave, about as queenly as a hobgoblin and totally disgusted with her people's endless requests for governance. She'd sent us packing, though not before letting on that she'd been the one playing with the mirror that had sent everyone down here.

 _Fucking Halaster and his fucking pranks_ , I thought bitterly. I was pretty sure he peeped on everyone else. He'd looked like a peeper, like some smelly old pervert who spent his days sitting by his window with a pair of binoculars in one hand and his junk in the other. But just let somebody peep on _him_ with a magic mirror, and suddenly he's teleporting their city from the top of the mountain to the bottom and twisting everyone who lived there inside out.

There was Shaori, a queen who'd rejected her throne. There was the librarian, who'd been a beautiful elven woman who lived for her books but was now a book-burning medusa. The wizard who gave up magic, the pimply apprentice who became the wizard and swapped his girly mags for a pentagram, the merchant who hated nothing more than having to deal with customers, and a city full of avariel who smiled and smiled while shadows crept into their eyes and their wings rotted on their backs.

I stepped past an avariel woman happily washing herself in handfuls of dust outside an abandoned shop. Her efforts had caked her with filth from head to toe. I looked away, anger surging through me with such force that goosebumps rose all over my skin and my jaw clenched. Halaster had a lot to answer for. He'd plucked the feathers from the wings of angels. "It's like it's Opposite Day, every day, down here," I muttered to myself.

Valen looked at me sharply. "What?"

I shrugged one shoulder. "It's a game we used to play as kids," I explained. "You announce that today's Opposite Day, and from then on, everything you say or do is the opposite of what you really mean." I nodded at the dusty avariel. "These people are trapped in one long Opposite Day."

A little furrow appeared in Valen's forehead. "You are right." Suddenly, he snapped his fingers. "A reflection. That is what they are. They are all reflections of their true selves."

Deekin was nodding. "Yeah. That make sense. It be almost like the mirror cast a mirror image spell, only the real person went _poof_!"

Valen growled a little under his breath. "Yes, I understand what you are saying, kobold, but if you do not stop making that damnable 'poof' noise I shall be forced to behead you."

"That not be good. Deekin not be able to write epic tale about Boss with no head."

"You did it last time," I muttered. "Why should this time be any different?"

Faintly, Valen snickered.

Deekin rolled his eyes. "Everybody gotta be a critic and make poor little Deekin suffer for his art," he lamented.

"Hate to tell you this, little buddy, but when it comes to your art, everybody suffers."

Valen snickered a little more audibly.

Deekin blinked. Then he grinned. "Ooh. Good one, Boss." He groped for his quill. "Deekin gotta write that one down."

"Thanks. I think." Frowning, I pulled Kelavir's fluorspar stone out of my pocket and bounced it in my hand. I wondered what he would have to say about this situation, but really, I didn't have to wonder. He'd say that birds didn't belong in cages, and neither did people. I couldn't just leave the avariel trapped in this. If I did, the guilt would dog me to my grave. I closed my fingers over the stone until it hurt my fingers, as if I could draw strength out of it if I just held it hard enough. "We have to get these people out of here. Somehow."

Valen's head turned to me. His eyebrows climbed in clear surprise. "I am glad to hear you say that."

I shrugged, looking away. "What am I supposed to do?" I grumbled. "Walk away?" I bounced the fluorspar one last time, then dropped it back into my pocket. "Besides, Halaster and the Valsharess put a spoke in _my_ wheels. This looks like a chance to return the favor."

Valen's voice sounded a little disappointed. "Is that what this is about? Revenge on Halaster and the Valsharess?"

My shoulders hitched irritably. "This is about fixing shit that _they_ broke," I snapped. "And if I have to wreck _their_ shit to do it, that's just fine by me." Then I stomped away without waiting to hear the next argument or disapproving comment that was, I had no doubt, on its way.

We turned down another path, one we'd never been down before. I remembered looking west and seeing more buildings from the wizard's window, and though I couldn't see them from the ground, I'd marked the direction in my head. Now I just kept heading towards them, guided by the pull of my internal compass. Where there were buildings, there were people, and where there were people, maybe there'd be help, or at least information.

Eventually, the path opened up and deposited us in front of a temple. Deekin crept up to the temple's door. He ran his hands along the door's carvings, his palms flat and fingers wide, as if trying to absorb the knowledge in it through touch alone. "Aerdrie Faenya," he said, pointing at the carving of a flying bird over the door. "She be a friend of your god, Boss. She be the elven sky lady."

I raised my eyebrows. "Really? Let's go in, then. Maybe we'll find somebody nice," I said, stepping over the threshold. The smell of dead, rotting things hit me like a hammer. I clapped my hand over my nose and mouth. Too late, I remembered about Opposite Day. "Or…not."

The temple's entrance hall had been gleaming white marble, but now it was streaked with black and green mold. Trash rotted in corners, flies buzzed, cockroaches scurried, slime oozed down the once pristine walls, and greasy, horrible puddles pooled all over the floor.

"Lovely." Valen's voice was as flat as a pancake. "This almost reminds me of home." He sniffed the air. "Smells like it, too."

I spared him a sharp glance over my shoulder. "Where the hell are _you_ from? Jersey?"

He blinked at me. "Where?"

I turned to face front again. "Never mind. Forget I said anything."

The temple was empty except for a man. He was facing the altar in the patient pose of a priest, hands clasped and eyes upraised. Behind the altar was a cage, strands of moss and strange fungus hanging from its bars.

My steps slowed when I saw him. The man was an avariel, but he'd lost his wings. Scabbed and mutilated stumps were all that remained.

Then the mutilated avariel turned, and his eyes fell on me, green and cold and cutting.

I jerked to a stop. Hot and cold ran through me in waves. I touched my forehead with a suddenly shaking hand. My fingers came away damp with sweat. I frowned at them, then looked up. The avariel man's face was bone-white and scarred, and when he saw my holy symbol, his lips twisted as if he'd tasted something bitter. "Shaundakul," he said, his voice dripping with loathing. "Here?"

I managed to find my voice. It was a croak. "That's his name," I said. I started walking again, a measured and careful pace towards the altar. My eyes fell on the other priest's holy symbol. _Talona_. I made myself smile. "Careful you don't catch his attention," I went on, low and slow. This shitlicker could insult _me_ all he wanted, but nobody named my salvation in that tone. "He doesn't like it when people threaten us."

The priest's lip curled. "I do not fear Shaundakul. He is weak – the failed god of failed souls."

Anger coiled in my stomach like a kindling fire. " _Weak_? You ever hear the wind _roar_ , little man?"

The avariel shrugged. "Roar all you wish. The winds hold no sway here, and they cannot cleanse you of Talona's rot." He gave me a mocking little bow. "But where are my manners? Welcome, Windwalker. I am Lomylithrar the Rotting, and I am the keeper of your disease."

I felt a hot-and-cold shiver run through me and gritted my teeth. "Fine. Just keep it to yourself, would you?"

The avariel's eyes searched my face. "Your flippant words will not hide the truth. I see Talona's poison already seeping through your veins. You can feel it, can't you?"

I didn't answer. Maybe Valen had a point about being careful which doors you walked through. I was starting to wish I hadn't walked through this one.

A hand touched my shoulder. "My la-" Valen stopped and cleared his throat. "Windwalker. Are you…well?"

I shook his hand off and put on a disarming smile. "I'm fine," I lied. I didn't take my eyes off the Talontar, whose smile only grew.

Deekin picked his way to my side, careful to avoid putting his feet near anything gross and almost succeeding. "What happened to him, Boss?" he asked me. He eyed the priest, seeming a little reluctant to talk to the crazy mutilated guy directly, for some reason. "He followed the nice lady Aerdrie, didn't he? Why he follow the stinky goddess now?"

Finally, some emotion other than sadistic glee crossed Lomylithrar's face. It was white-knuckled fury. "Do not utter that name in this place," he spat. He drew in a breath, steadying himself. "Yes, I followed that flighty slut, but when I came down here, I saw the error of my ways. The crisp, clean air of the soaring mountains suddenly disgusted me. I yearned for the cloying decay of pestilence and disease." He shrugged. "Talona just seemed the logical choice."

I stared at him. "Doesn't that strike you as a little strange? From Aerdrie-" I saw his scowl, and smiled a little more. "-to this?"

The priest shrugged again. "There are many things about this world that I find odd, but I do not let them trouble me. I let my thoughts dwell on the scarred face of my goddess. I let her rotting embrace envelop me, and I feel peace."

I stared at him a moment longer. Then, without breaking eye contact, I moved my head enough to talk to the others out of the corner of my mouth. "Okay. This guy's nuts."

Valen had that confused look on his face again. "Nuts?"

I blinked. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I tried to ignore it. "Insane," I translated.

Comprehension reached Valen's eyes. "Ah. Barmy. Now I understand." He looked at me more closely. Suddenly, he reached out, turning my face to his with his fingertips on my chin. His eyes searched mine, then widened a little in alarm. "I knew it," he growled. "I knew that sphinx's smile. You were lying. You are not well." He let go of me, and his head swung balefully towards the priest. For once, his glower wasn't aimed at me. "What have you done?"

Lomylithrar smiled with queerly tranquil malice. "Talona has chosen her for a trial." He chuckled for a moment before the stumps of his wings moved, and then his chuckle turned into a hiss of pain. Still, he never lost his smile. "The irony is delicious, is it not? The ignorant say that the wind will cleanse disease, and yet Talona has reached out her hand and touched one of Shaundakul's own."

Valen's tail lashed. "I know nothing of this Shaundakul, but I know something of Talona," he said, his voice quiet and hard-edged with anger. "She is a vile goddess, and if she has a purpose here, it is anything but lofty."

The scarred avariel shrugged. "That is a matter of perspective, is it not?" He turned to me, visibly dismissing the tiefling. "Talona wishes to test you. She has infected you with her burning essence, and the only way to be free of this sickness is to prove yourself worthy."

This was ridiculous. I didn't have time for this. Anger simmered in my throat and ran away with my mouth. "Worthy? How? By making a donation so your goddess can buy herself a new face and a pair of tits that doesn't sag?" I started patting my pockets. "All right. Hold on. I think I've got some spare change here somewhere…"

Lomylithrar's smile got even more twisted. "Your words are air. My goddess hears them, and is unmoved. What are words in the face of death?" He gestured to the cage behind the altar. "If you wish her hand to be lifted from you, you must prove yourself in combat. If you are strong enough to survive in battle while infected, then you are worthy of life."

I snorted. "What, against you?" He looked skinny and sickly. Valen would probably smash him into a pulp. "Right on."

Lomylithrar shook his head. "No. Against a minion of Talona." His eyes gleamed. "Alone."

I tried not to shiver. It felt like the chills were getting worse, together with the fever and a pain in my throat as if I'd swallowed stinging nettles. Sweat was beading on my forehead. My eyes roamed, looking for a way out. They fell on a pile of trash, and then lower still, to where something pale protruded. For a second, I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I saw the black fingertips, and the blotchy discoloration of rot on bloodless skin, and the shudder that went through me then had nothing to do with fever.

I lifted my eyes. The elf was watching me and smiling. Heat chased away my chills. _Son of a bitch_. He'd done this before. I looked at the other piles, and there, too, I saw shapes that looked like they'd once been people. At least one of those shapes had feathers.

At last, my eyes went to the altar. There was a sliver of mirrored glass there. The sullen, flat buzz of carrion flies filled my ears. "I'll do it," I heard myself say. Anger rimed my voice, made it come out hard and cold and biting. "If you give me that mirror shard." If I could fix the mirror, maybe I could stop this. I couldn't fix it. Not for those poor bastards. But maybe I could stop it from happening again.

Lomylithrar glanced behind him. "Something to sweeten the deal?" he asked. He turned back to me and nodded. "Very well. The shard is quite useless to me, now that the mirror is broken. If you survive Talona's trials, you may have it – and the cure." He pulled a small clay bottle out from a hidden pocket in his robes, shook it at me so that it sloshed, and returned it to his pocket. "It is the only cure, I am afraid. Divinely inflicted disease will not respond to mundane cures, or even to your healing magic. You may make the attempt, but you will not succeed."

I stared at the priest, then looked down at my hand. My vision shifted. I could see the heat of disease running through me. Summoning my power, I breathed in, trying to draw a cleansing wind into my lungs and force it through my veins, to hunt down and tear apart whatever nasty little microscopic critters were making me sick. This was the only kind of healing I was good at, and I wasn't even sure it was healing so much as destruction in another form. This time, though, I couldn't even seem to find anything to destroy. It was as if the sickness was encased in some slimy, airtight film that my power couldn't penetrate.

I looked up and saw Lomylithrar watching me and smiling. "As I said," he told me. He tapped his chest where the potion lay in a hidden pocket.

I felt Valen grab my shoulder. "Do not," he warned. "He is toying with you. We should kill him and take the cure."

The priest was watching us with an unpleasant smile. It occurred to me that maybe we shouldn't plot his murder in front of him. "Excuse me," I told him, swaying slightly. "I have to consult with my colleague here." I was aware that I was starting to feel a little lightheaded. I would never have come up with a sentence like that in a normal frame of mind.

I hustled Valen out of earshot, or maybe he hustled me – it was kind of hard to tell – and I lowered my voice. "I think I have to do it," I said. "I tried to cure myself. It didn't work."

The tiefling glared at me. Why was he glaring at me? I wasn't the plague-worshipping maniac here. "I have met creatures like this one before. He will make you suffer, and that includes allowing you to hope for success until all hope is lost. I know how these games work. The only way to win them is not to play."

I was already shaking my head, even as he spoke. "No. Listen to me." I coughed and winced. My throat was on fire. "You remember? About Opposite Day?" At his nod, I went on. "If this guy is this evil after the mirror changed him, then he must have been an angel before. You wanna be the one who murdered an angel, when all is said and done?"

Valen drew back a little, frowning. "I see your point. Although I think you mean 'celestial'. I would not recommend using the word 'angel' in front of a celestial, if you value your ears." He let go of me, doubt carved in every stiff line of his face. "Very well. I will stay my hand. For now."

I nodded curtly and turned away. My fingernails drummed on Enserric's blade. "Enserric. Wake up. I need to talk to you."

Glitters rippled across the black blade. "Ye gods!" Enserric's librarian-in-a-tin-can voice said. "What is that stench?" I felt that weird stuttering, fluttering sensation that meant Enserric was going through my head. Red light flared deep in the blade, and his voice turned alarmed. "Wielder, _what_ have you gotten yourself into?" He paused, then added, "This time?"

I sighed. "You know what." _You just went through my head, so don't act surprised,_ I added silently.

 _Well, forgive me for my optimism, but I did not expect you to be so foolish as to volunteer for a fight, under the circumstances,_ the sword answered, his mental voice waspish.

 _It's not like I had a choice, and you know it._ I walked back towards the priest, who was waiting with a gleefully malevolent smile. _Just…if you've figured anything out, now would be the time to tell me._

The sword pulsed red. _I….I am not certain,_ he answered, and I didn't need to hear his hesitation to feel his doubt. Red shivered down the blade. _Proceed, wielder. I will try my best._

 _Oh, that makes me feel_ so _much better,_ I thought morosely, and stopped in front of the smirking elf. "All right," I said. I grounded Enserric and stood with my hands folded on his pommel. I blinked a stinging bead of sweat out of my eyes and tried to breathe through the dread building in my chest. "We'll do it your way. For now."

The elf smiled. "Excellent." He opened the cage, which rattled and screeched on rusty hinges. "When you are ready for your challenge, enter."

The fever-shivers were starting to get harder to hide. "Fine," I snapped, and stalked past him.

The cage closed behind me with a clang. The sound of chanting rose. I mopped my forehead with the back of my hand, settled my grip on Enserric, and frantically sorted through Drogan's lessons and the lessons I'd learned in my travels since then. There was nothing with me in the cage except for some piles of trash, or at least nothing visible, which meant that the priest was likely to summon some creature to fight me. That meant I probably didn't need to shield against spells or arrows, especially since the space was too small for anything but a hand-to-hand fight. But what creature? When a Windwalker called, birds and wolves and deer and other fast, far-roaming animals answered. What would answer to a Talontar?

My question was answered by a squeak and the scratching of lots of little claws.

A nose poked out of the nearest trash pile, whiskers twitching. Then another, and another, and suddenly there were four filthy, stinking, coarse-furred bodies heaving themselves out of each corner, each one at least two feet long from their noses to the tips of their naked tails.

I settled into a fighting stance. "Oh, rats," I said in disgust, right before the first one came at me.

The first dire rat jumped up like an overexcited puppy, its bloodshot eyes at least half-mad and its claws out. I batted it aside with Enserric and felt a moment's resistance before the sword bit in, shearing through fur and flesh and bone so easily it caught me by surprise. Silent Partner usually needed a lot more force behind its blows. I staggered a half-step in the direction of my swing, almost losing my balance as that strange wash of cold went through me again.

Enserric spoke up suddenly, right in my brain. _To your left!_

I turned and struck out again, shaky from a sudden bout of shivers – whether from fever or Enserric's enchantment, I couldn't even tell. Half a rat's leg thunked to the ground, and its previous owner tumbled away, chittering so loudly that I didn't hear the last rat coming up behind me until I heard a growl and felt the tug of a heavy weight climbing up my pants leg.

I spun, kicking out reflexively, but all that did was knock the rat my ass off long enough for it to bounce back up and latch on to my knee instead. Claws dug into my thigh as the thing made straight for my face, yellow teeth bared and long black tongue uncurling in a hiss.

A memory of Kelavir in action flared, and in a rush I shifted my grip on Enserric until I had one hand on the hilt and the other on the blade and I lifted the sword up and drove the point down into the dire rat, yelling something even I didn't quite catch. The black blade slid down the rat's gullet, and the animal's sudden, choking spasms vibrated all the way up the sword. I yanked Enserric back up, bracing myself against the now-familiar wash of cold. My clawed thigh went numb for a split-second, and the rat dropped, writhing.

 _Behind you!_ Enserric screamed into my head, and almost before the words had finished I was turning, lashing out as a hideous rat-thing rose through the air at me, claws out.

Fortunately, the dire rat was a big target, and the black blade thrashed the thing, throwing it aside like a ragdoll. I followed the sword's arc all the way around, its point sparking against the ground as it hit.

As soon as my last opponent stopped moving, the cage clanked open.

I staggered out of the cage, holding Enserric one-handed and bracing myself on the doorframe. "That it?" I asked Lomylithrar. "We done?"

The elf considered. "Not yet."

I stared at him. "Whaddya mean, 'not yet'? You said I had to fight. I fought."

The avariel inclined his head. "I did. But we do not choose how sickness afflicts us, nor through how many stages a disease may pass." He smiled at me unpleasantly. "You have proven yourself worthy of continuance. Of survival…that, we shall see."

I looked at the elf's scarred face, and I imagined killing him and just taking the potion and the shard from his corpse. It was a horrible thought. I didn't know how it had come into my brain. I had never been a killer. What had this life made of me? "How many more stages?" I demanded.

Lomylithrar bowed his head in thought. "Two more, perhaps three. I cannot be certain. You are strong. To test you lightly would do you a disservice."

"Oh, _please,_ " I snarled. "Do me a disservice. Degrade me." I'd degraded myself enough in the past – there was nothing I hadn't drunk or smoked or snorted or shot into my veins, no surface I hadn't vomited on, no orifice I hadn't let someone do something to. What was a little more? "I can take it."

The avariel was unmoved. "It is Talona's will that you face her trials. It is not her will that you be degraded. Only…tested."

I stared at him. "Her will?" A shudder wracked me. I had to lean on Enserric to keep from falling. "Or yours?" He didn't answer.

Valen moved up next to me. "You were serious when you said you were no warrior," he observed in a low voice. "Are you sure you can do this?"

Well, there went my ego. And here I thought I'd done okay. "Yeah, well. I'm gonna have to become a warrior in the next-" I looked at my wrist as if checking a watch. "-oh, let's say five minutes. Any professional advice?"

The tiefling stood stiff-backed and tense. "Don't die."

I blinked, hard. My vision was swimming. "Thank you, you've been very helpful," I said, and went back into the cage. My shoulder bumped the doorframe, making the metal ring and my scales jingle. The door slammed behind me.

A little snippet of song came back to me from my childhood. _Second round, same as the first,_ I thought. _A little bit louder and a little bit worse!_ A nostalgic grin crooked my lips, and I stood, waiting and trying not to giggle. The fever was getting worse, I knew. I was having trouble focusing, and my knees were trembling as if they wanted to fold. It took most of my focus just to stay upright.

The priest chanted, and slowly, something materialized in front of me. It was dark, hyena-shaped, and snarling. Cold steam poured off it like dry ice.

A voice hit my ears, and I the relief I felt when I heard it damn near floored me. Or maybe that was the fever. "That is a vorr – an Abyssal hound!" Valen called through the bars. "Make light, if you can! They hate the light!"

I didn't argue. I threw Enserric into my right hand and reached into my pocket with my left. The fluorspar stone glittered in my hand, and I breathed on it, willing it to shine.

Light started to streak out through my fingers, white and bright. The vorr yipped and scuttled back, trying to escape the circle of light. I threw the stone down at its feet, nice and close, and swung Enserric with both hands.

Blinded and stunned by the light, the vorr didn't even try to dodge. A hyena-like head thudded to the ground.

The door swung open. I scrabbled on the floor for my stone, then reeled around and stumbled through the door without stopping. Deekin and Valen both stepped forward. I waved them back, my stomach roiling. "'Scuse me," I slurred, and lurched towards a handy ceremonial urn. "Gotta hurl."

The bile tasted as awful as I remembered from the last time I'd worshipped the porcelain goddess, and I had the dry heaves for a few long, humiliating moments afterwards. I hung face down in the urn for a few more breaths after that, then spat the last of the taste out of my mouth and pushed myself back upright. That maneuver had apparently been premature, because my knees buckled, and I had to grab the rim of the urn to hold myself up, panting, until the worst of the weakness had passed. I was drenched with sweat. I didn't want to think about how I must have smelled.

When I felt like I could at least sort of trust my legs, I pried my fingers away from the mouth of the urn. I turned, one hand planted on the urn's side to keep me from toppling over. Then I pushed myself off and wove my way back to the cage, the floor seeming to tilt underfoot like a boat's deck. Spots danced in front of my eyes. By dint of a lot of squinting, I managed to make some of the spots resolve themselves in the shape of Valen. He was easy to spot, at least – white skin, red hair, green mithril. In some countries back in my old world, his coloring probably would have been considered patriotic. I held back a giggle, and some part of me was aware that I was heading rapidly from _not-in-my-right-mind_ to _totally-out-of-my-mind_.

I clapped the tiefling's shoulder as I passed, or tried to. My aim was a little off, and the gesture ended up being glancing. "Thanks," I croaked. My voice had gone down by about an octave and gotten gravelly besides. "I owe you one."

Valen was frowning. "You owe me nothing," he said dismissively, but he still watched me as if he was waiting to catch me when, not if, I collapsed.

Lomylithrar was frowning, too, but unlike Valen, he was less worried and more disapproving. "This fight is the Windwalker's, and hers alone," he told the tiefling, ignoring me. "It is not for you to aid her, even with advice. Do not do that again."

Red flashed in Valen's eyes, and his nostrils flared. "You do not play fair, and she is my ally," he said darkly. "If we must do this, then we must, but I will not stand by and watch her fall."

The avariel's frown turned upside down. "Oh, but you will, or she will never find her cure." He turned and held out a hand. "Are you ready for the next challenge?"

I swallowed hard and wondered how Lomylithrar's face would look, decorated with puke. It would probably be an improvement. Wordlessly, I pushed past him and into the cage again.

 _Third round, same as the first,_ I thought, and wheezed a humorless laugh. It was getting hard to breathe. My heart raced, buzzing dumbly against my ribs like a fly against a windowpane. A fit of coughing made my ribs creak, and after it was done, I tasted bile and something underneath it, a familiar copper reek. I worked a wad of spit to my tongue and spat. My phlegm was bloody. _Gross,_ I thought, and laughed again. Then I stood in the center of the cage and waited, swaying.

The ground under my feet shuddered. It took me a moment to realize it wasn't just the fever that made everything feel like it was moving – everything _really was moving_.

Then the ground startled to buckle, and two tooth-studded tentacles reached up out of it and pulled a pulsating garbage sack of a body out of the floor itself. A slavering, tooth-lined maw opened and a smell that went beyond mere halitosis came out of it, along with a deep, gurgling growl.

I backed into the corner. My back hit the cage. _That's an otyugh,_ I thought, a little hysterically, only this one was no normal otyugh. This one stank with sickness and madness in equal measure, Talona's creature in every way.

The otyugh heaved its body around. Tentacles lashed out, and all that saved me was that the thing was sloppy in its madness, and the tentacles crashed into the cage above my head, shaking the bars.

I tried to focus. "Otyughs are slow, lass," Drogan said, only I didn't know how he was talking. He was dead. I'd seen the ceiling come down on him. "Never mind that, lass," Drogan reassured me, and when I turned, I saw his familiar silhouette, standing half in light and half in shadow right beside me with his gnarled hands resting calmly on his cane. "Just ye listen to me. If ye must fight these ponderous beasties, get behind 'em where they can't get at ye."

I stared at my teacher, my eyes tracing every line of his dear old face. Tears blurred my vision. "I've missed you," I said hoarsely. "So much."

Drogan's eyes twinkled at me from behind his spectacles. "I've missed ye, too, lass, but ye need to focus, now. Can ye do that for me?"

I could. I thought I could. It was getting harder to think, and the otyugh was moving again, but I saw an opening under its waving tentacles and stumbled for it, just as Drogan had told me.

The otyugh roared. It started to turn, and I moved, trying to stay behind it.

A shadow flickered from the corner of my eye. "Wielder!" it shouted. "I have it! Attend me!"

I half-turned and blinked. There was a man standing next to me. He was a spare man with a haughty face and longish black hair going white at the temples. Something about him seemed familiar. "Enserric?" I asked.

"No," the man answered in Enserric's voice, minus the metallic overtones. "Or rather, yes, but not as you see here. You are hallucinating. Rather violently, I might add, but never mind that, for the moment." He had piercing grey eyes. They held mine. "I think I have the solution. That power in you. We must-"

Creeping shadows and flickering lights moved in my peripheral vision. I'd already jerked around before I realized that they weren't really there, just in time to hear a roar rattle the cage and – too late – to see the otyugh closing on me, its awful jawless mouth looming wide.

Then a shadow swept over my head, thrumming like singing steel, and the otyugh bounced off of a wall of air as solid as stone.

 _Shaundakul._ He was here – I could feel him. I found myself laughing in crazy gratitude, at least until a glittering red-black hand reached in front of my face and snapped its fingers. "Wielder!" Enserric shouted in my ear. "I. Need. You. To. Pay. Attention!"

I swung my head around. "Huh? Yeah. Sorry. What?"

He grabbed me by the hand. "What weapon does your god use?" he yelled. "Think! No – actually, do not think, we do not have time for experiments. Just answer!"

I blinked and tried to think. "Uh. A greatsword?"

"Exactly!" Enserric screamed at me exultantly. "You may not know how to use me, but your god does!" He jabbed me in the chest with a remarkably solid-feeling finger. "Just let me _through_ , you bloody blockhead!"

The otyugh raged and began feeling its way around the invisible wall between us. I felt another wall slam into place, keeping it at bay. "To what?"

Enserric shook me. "To Shaundakul's gift! The knowledge of how to use me is in the power he gave you! You must use it!"

I stared at the otyugh, thrashing just a few feet away. "How?"

"Do not think!" Enserric snapped at me desperately. His eyes were black now, pupil and iris, with red sparks in their depths. "For the love of the gods, your only saving grace is that your power does not require _thinking_! Stop thinking and just _use_ it!"

I stared at him a moment longer, entranced by the red sparkles in his eyes. Then the otyugh roared, and I blinked, and I saw the blade in front of my face, black and hungry as an open grave.

The world tilted. I felt like I was falling, falling into the black, and I closed my eyes, instinctively reaching down into the spark of divine power that hummed in my heart and in my throat and in my head.

When I opened my eyes again, the world looked…different.

Enserric pulsed red, burning as cold as a dying star. I stared into the blade's red flicker and felt its soul-sucking chill and followed that shivering trail in, into the sword's glassy depths and into the pulse of my blood and then deeper still, to where its dark energy had wrapped itself around my heart. Holding the cold and my pulse and the hum of power in my mind, I tried to see how they might fit together….

And then, suddenly, they did. The separate threads of rushing blood and storm-driven power and dark energy came together in a crazy rhythm, like the players in a jazz combo. I jerked. Cold howled through me like a blizzard, and for a moment I thought I was going to come apart, that the blizzard would shatter me and the pieces it left behind would melt into the stone and vanish like ice in a thaw.

And then a shadow moved over me, like a cloud passing over the sun, and the storm of ice steadied until I felt it running through me like a whitewater river, frigid and roaring but still somehow _contained_.

A silk-wrapped hilt settled into my hands, and I flexed my fingers, seeing a blade like a night sky in front of me and feeling its vicious edge like the boundary of my own soul and I thought, _Shaundakul help me. This feels…right._ Then: _I'm sorry, Harry._

The otyugh broke through Shaundakul's wall. I saw a tentacle flash towards me, its tooth-studded pad open to strike, and I twisted in place, swinging Enserric up and around even as I felt the blade quiver in excitement and hurl itself into my swing, or maybe I was hurling myself into his - for a split second, it was hard to tell who was swinging whom, and for a split second I didn't even care.

The sword's shadow flashed, and the severed end of a tentacle thudded down near my feet.

Unfortunately, the otyugh had two tentacles, and the next one hit me in the side, right under the ribs.

My back hit the cage. I heard the bars rattle and heard a weirdly merry little tinkle and patter of scales falling to the ground, but noise was a distant second to the hot, tearing pain in my side.

I couldn't see. A hand slapped my face, none too gently. "Move, you idiot woman!" Xanos roared. "Did Drogan teach you nothing? Fight! I did not save you to see you die to a sentient cesspit!"

My eyes stung. _I've missed you, too. Asshole._ I couldn't see where Xanos was, which was weird because it wasn't like he was the kind of person who blended into the background, but no matter, he was right, I had to move. There was a big, ugly otyugh mouth in front of me, but there was clear air to the side. Somehow, I managed to throw myself at it. Something hot trickled down my side, and I felt my skin move and slide and pull strangely where the otyugh had hit me, like it wasn't quite holding together any more.

My shoulder hit something that rattled. A hideous, pustule-ridden flank heaved, or maybe it was a shadow. Either way, I thought I should hit it, so I turned and spun Enserric like a spear, my hands moving as if they'd played this tune before and had just been waiting for the rest of me to remember the way the notes went. I raised the sword high before driving it, point-down, into the otyugh's side. Then I yanked the sword back out with a wrenching pull, feeling Enserric slice easily through flesh and opening a wound that stank like a million landfills.

Blood steamed on the glassy black blade, and the cold that went through me then bit all the way into my bones. I would have screamed if I had the breath. Red light flared, and I felt my torn skin moving, pulling, twisting, stitching itself back together. It was relief and agony all in one, and when it was done, I was amazed to find myself still standing.

I blinked and shook my head muzzily, chasing shadows away from the corner of my vision. In front of me, a heap of flesh sagged.

Quietly, the cage door clinked open.

My head swung. I saw a fallen angel with filthy, shattered wings, grinning like a hyena at my pain. "You," I rasped. Rage rose in me, bright and hot. _Toy with me, will you?_ I thought, or Enserric thought, or maybe we both thought. _Well, we'll just see about that._ I shifted my grip on the sword, my eyes on the elf's throat.

Lomylithrar looked at me, then spread his hands in a bow. "I am impressed. Talona's plague has brought you great suffering, and yet you continue to fight it. Your will to live is strong, Windwalker."

My shoulder slammed into the cage door as I went through it, but my eyes didn't leave the elf. "You want suffering, motherfucker?" I snarled, maddened with fever and fury and hatred and other things I had no name for. "I'll show you suffering." I reached the elf and, without pausing, bashed his face with the crossguard of my sword, feeling his nose give way. The elf went down, clutching at his face. He went still when he felt Enserric's point press beneath his chin. The red in the sword had almost swallowed the black. "Enough games." The elf's nose was gushing a satisfying amount of blood. I could feel Enserric's spiteful satisfaction at the sight of it, or was the feeling mine? I couldn't tell anymore where I ended and the blade began. "Give me the vial. Now."

The elf held my eyes, unblinking. "You may rest easy." There was a strange note in his voice, almost like respect. "You have passed Talona's trials and proven yourself stronger than her servants. If you release me, I will give you the cure."

I didn't let him go. "Why release you?" I asked. I was unclean, but he was filth. It would be so easy to end him, to throw open the doors to his temple and let the clean air come in and scour all of this sickness and cruelty away. "I could just take it off your corpse. No one would miss you."

I felt a hand grab my arm, restraining me. "Windwalker," a soft, husky voice said. "Do not do this. Remember what you said to me."

I didn't look back. "I changed my mind. You were right. The world would be a better place without him."

The hand on my arm was gentle but insistent, not quite pulling me back but not letting me move forward an inch, either. "No. I know how you are feeling, but if you give in now, you will hate yourself for it later. Trust me."

Another voice spoke, this one low to the ground and squeaky. "Boss?" it said. A tentative hand touched my knee. "You don't kill people, Boss. Not like this. This not be like you."

How did he know what I was? _I_ didn't even know what I was, and I was me.

Then, with a faint noise, some awful growth up on the ceiling popped, and a sudden stream of _something_ liquid suddenly came showering down on my head.

Goo pattered over me. I didn't know what was, but it was green and slimy and stank and did the job a thousand calming words couldn't do. My head cleared. I spat out a glob of I didn't even want to know what. "That. Wasn't. _Water!_ " I shouted in the general direction of the sky. I lifted Enserric from Lomylithrar's throat. "Give me the shard and the cure," I told the elf. My legs were shaking so badly that if it wasn't for Valen's hand, now cupping my elbow, I would have collapsed. "Now."

The elf got slowly to his feet, his hand on his bloodied nose and his eyes on mine, wary yet oddly calm. He handed me the shard, then fished the vial out of his robes and gave it to me. I uncorked it, and without hesitating, tossed the whole thing down. I didn't care if it was poison. I felt like I was about to die, anyway.

The stuff tasted like cough syrup and was ice cold. I stood, blinking, as it slid into my stomach. A tingle went through me. "Oh," I said. The fever was gone, and the dizziness, and the nausea, and the weird little capering shadow gremlins that had been dancing at the corners of my vision, and I had to say that it was a huge relief to see those little shits gone.

The weakness wasn't gone, though. My legs finally gave out, and without any further ceremony, I fell over.

Strong arms caught me before I hit the ground. "I have you," Valen said in my ear. "Are you hurt? Can you stand?"

I clutched blindly for support. My hands felt cold, hard metal, and a leather-wrapped arm that was a hell of a lot warmer but not much softer. "Not hurt. Can't stand, though," I croaked. My heart was beating way too fast, and my muscles were shaking with exhaustion.

Valen paused. "You truly cannot, can you?" He sounded resigned. "Very well. Hold on." His grip on me shifted, one arm going behind my knees as the other slipped more securely around my shoulders, and then gravity abruptly stopped applying to me as he lifted me off my feet with a grunt of effort.

I would have liked to complain about being carted around like a helpless invalid, but the sudden shift was making my head spin and I couldn't quite seem to get my tongue to work. By the time I regained a few of my senses, we were already moving. My arm was trapped between me and what felt like a solid wall of metal. I tried to shift, failed, gave up, and resigned myself to being carried, as I didn't seem to have the strength to do anything else. Besides, I was kind of impressed. I wasn't Mags, but I wasn't petite by any stretch of the imagination, either. Swinging that monstrous flail around had obviously worked wonders for the man's upper body strength.

The cavern outside was musty, but it was still a fair sight better than Talona's stink, and I breathed the relatively fresh air in with relief. My eyes couldn't seem to stay open, so after a couple of half-hearted attempts to pry my eyelids apart, I let them stay securely stuck together. Valen said something to someone, probably Deekin. I didn't understand the words, but that was actually fine, because as it turned out his voice was awfully nice to listen to as long as I didn't have to pay attention to what he was saying.

Lulled by that voice and a steady sensation of movement, I fell into a doze. I had no idea how much time passed. All I knew was that at a certain point, I stopped moving, and then there was cold rock against my back, and I made a little noise of protest in my throat because I'd gotten all nice and warm and comfy and now I wasn't any of those things.

Metal jingled. Hands pressed against my side. I felt dizzy. Without managing to open my eyes, I moved my fingers and shifted uneasily, searching for something, I wasn't sure what. A silk-wrapped hilt was slipped under my hand. It felt wrong. I should have felt wood, warm and softly buzzing, but when my fingers closed around the weapon under my hand, a soothing coolness ran through me like a mountain stream, and suddenly it didn't feel so wrong anymore.

Half-conscious, I traced the stream back to its source and found a familiar presence lodging not-so-comfortably in the back of my mind, like a splinter. _Was that really you I saw?_ I asked the little splinter of awareness. _The way you were before….you know._

Enserric seemed to consider that for several moments before answering. _I do not know. I…can no longer remember what I looked like._

There was an echo of sadness in his tone, or maybe the sadness was mine. _I'm sorry._

The sword's voice was light, indifferent. _Do not be. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps our connection has unearthed memories I believed lost. Or perhaps it was just a fever dream. Does it matter? That life is over. That man is gone._

I remembered the grey-eyed man. There'd been a sadness to him, underneath the haughtiness. _Not entirely._

Enserric's voice held a wistful note. _Is that so? I am not so certain. Am I the soul of a man in a sword, or am I a sword which holds nothing more than a soul's echo?_

 _I don't know. Does it matter?_

 _No. Not really. Whatever I was before, now, I am just a weapon._ A sigh echoed in my head. _Perhaps that is for the best. I have had years to ponder the poor choices I made in life. To be free of the burden of choosing is…remarkably liberating._

That was a hell of a sad way to look at it – especially because I hadn't been making the greatest choices lately, myself, so I didn't think I was the best person for Enserric to be passing the buck to.

Enserric answered as if I'd spoken out loud. _Perhaps, perhaps not, but we are bound to each other until your death frees us both, so we might as well make the best of it._ He paused. _Although I will grant that it is not so poor a match as I feared at first._

 _What do you mean?_

 _I mean, dear wielder, that while I may be a weapon with the soul of a man,_ you _are surely a woman with the soul of a weapon._

I remembered my rage, red-hot and cutting, and I couldn't disagree – damn Enserric. Damn _me_. Was _that_ what Shaundakul had seen in me, all that time ago? Was that why he'd given me his power? So I could be a weapon? God knew I had always been better at wrecking shit than fixing it, but this…

The real world broke through my cocoon of semi-consciousness. Cool, dry hands were on me. I kind of wanted them to stop, but they were persistent. "Deekin coulda sworn that otyugh poked a big hole in Boss, but now there just be lots of blood and no hole. Her sword do all that?"

"Quite possibly. The enchantment on that thing is almost tangible. It makes my blood curdle." Another hand was pressed to my forehead, quick and impersonal. "Her fever is gone, as well. That armor will need repair, however."

"Long as Boss doesn't need repair, that all Deekin saying."

"You are a loyal friend, kobold. I will give you that much."

My chapped lips parted, with some difficulty. "He is," I said. My voice was barely a whisper, even to my own ears. "More than I deserve, all things considered." It occurred to me that I had no idea where I was, and maybe I should sit up and take a look around. Feebly, I tried.

An arm snaked under my shoulders. "Careful, Boss," Deekin cautioned. "Deekin pretty sure you not supposed to be that color. Maybe you should take it slow."

Unless I was purple with yellow polka dots, I was probably okay. "'m fine," I said, and peeled my eyes open. Stone swam into view. I sucked in a breath and shrank back against Deekin's arm. The ceiling was way too close. I hated the whining edge of anxiety that crept into my voice. So much for heroism. "W-where are we?"

"Goat man found a hidey-hole. We think it's safe. For now, anyway." A reptilian hand offered a waterskin. "Here. Drink. And don't look up. Deekin'll keep an eye on the ceiling for you, don't worry."

I shuddered. Then I took his advice and looked down, even though I could have sworn that I could still feel the weight of stone above me. My fingers shook on the skin, and Deekin had to uncork it for me and help me bring it to my lips. A few swallows of water went a long way towards soothing my parched throat and clearing my head.

With my head clearer, memories trickled back. Alarm hit me, and I struggled to sit up straighter. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the ceiling looming a little closer, and once again I shrank away. My breath got shallow and quick. I fought to control it, to keep myself from hyperventilating, to just _not think_ about all that stone up there.

Desperate, I looked straight ahead. We were in some kind of cave, barely more than an indentation in the rock large enough for the three of us to sit, and I could see relatively open space just beyond the cave's mouth. I tried to focus on that. "The shard," I said. My voice shook. "Tell me we have it."

Valen spoke. "Relax. Deekin picked it up when you fell. We have it."

I blew out a relieved breath. "Good. Thanks, Deeks. You're a life saver." I wiped my face. My hand came away covered in blood and ichor and I didn't even want to know what else. I stared at it in disgust. "At least I didn't go through all of that for nothing."

"No, you did not," Valen said. His voice had a note of grudging admiration. "You do not give up easily, do you? I suspect that if that elf _had_ succeeded in killing you, you would have clawed your way across the Planes and back to life just to spite him."

I turned my head to look at the redhead. He was crouched easily with his back to the wall, one forearm across his thigh, and his other resting, as always, on his weapon's hilt. I realized that I'd never actually seen him sitting, only standing or crouching as if he might have to spring up at any moment, and his eyes, as always, never stopped moving, as if he saw potential threats in every shadow.

His mannerisms niggled at my memory, and after a few moments, it came to me. He reminded me of the people I'd met the time I'd gone to do aid work in a war zone. The aid workers had had soldiers stationed at our compound, combat vets whose haunted eyes had seen some shit and which never stopped moving in case more shit was just coming over the horizon, men and women whose hands flashed to their weapons every time they heard a noise, who jumped if you came up to them too fast or touched them when they weren't expecting it, who always stood with their backs to the wall and sat only on the edges of their seats and if they slept it was with one hand on their sidearm, one eye open, and, from the way they thrashed sometimes in their sleep, one foot in Hell. That was what Valen acted like – an ex-soldier with the war still hanging over him like a headsman's axe. What kind of soldier and in what kind of war, though, I had no idea. "Was that a compliment?" I asked at last. "Or an insult?"

Valen raised his eyebrows. "It was an observation," he said. His eyes roamed over my face. Reaching out, he handed me a small scrap of cloth. "Here."

I took the cloth with a rueful grimace. "Do I want to look in a mirror right now?"

A smile flickered briefly across the tiefling's face. "Probably not."

I dampened the cloth with a little water and set to work mopping the worst of the mess from my face. There was probably nothing to be done about the rest of me. My hand shook a little. I wasn't sure if it was pure post-healing exhaustion or the aftershocks of adrenaline or the realization that I'd come close to fatally losing my temper. Again. "Thanks," I said abruptly. "For…you know. Everything."

Valen studied me a moment longer, then nodded and looked away - scanning the world outside our little shelter for signs of danger, as always. "You are welcome."


	27. War Stories

_A/N: Some election night consolation for my American readers.  
I've done my best to move away from the in-game dialogue here while keeping some important pieces and the right spirit/characterization. I hope I've succeeded. *fingers crossed*  
Also, I've been waiting for way too long to use these lyrics. I think the voice is even close to right. ;) Give it a listen on youtube, and I hope it seems appropriate to y'all, too.  
Enjoy!_

* * *

 _It was many years ago,  
_ _That I became what I am.  
_ _I was trapped in this life,  
_ _Like an innocent lamb._

 _Now I can only show my face,  
_ _At noon.  
_ _And you'll only see me walking,  
_ _By the light of the moon._

 _The brim of my hat  
_ _Hides the eye of a beast.  
_ _I've the face of a sinner,  
_ _But the hands of a priest._

 _Oh, you'll never see my shade,  
_ _Or hear the sounds of my feet.  
_ _While there's a moon  
_ _over Bourbon Street._

\- Sting, "Moon Over Bourbon Street"

 _The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future._

\- Oscar Wilde

~*~  
Chapter 27: War Stories  
~*~

Shaori's Fell was gone, vanished from the island as if it had never been.

Water lapped against the shore. "So the curse is lifted, and the avariel have gone back from whence they came," Valen remarked. His eyes went over the rocks where ruined streets and buildings used to be. "One hopes the queen showers her fool with kindness until the end of his days. I do not think I would have been able to make the sacrifice he did."

I sighed. "At least he'll never know about it." From village idiot to wise man and back again, the court fool had saved everybody by figuring out what was going on and piecing the mirror back together out of broken shards, and for his trouble he'd been dunked back into imbecility when the curse reverted. "There's that."

Valen nodded. "There is that," he agreed, although he didn't sound very enthusiastic about his agreement. If anything, he sounded about as glum as me. Then he squared his shoulders, seeming to throw off the gloom with that single determined motion. "Ah, well. Cavallas will be waiting. Shall we go?"

I wished I could throw off my gloomy mood that easily, although I had no idea how. I had a geas digging into my skull, a drow with a pet archdevil out for my blood, a dead man's soul riding shotgun in my head, and my temper was turning into a killer instinct. Hard to see the silver lining in all of that. "Yeah," I said eventually, and shifted my grip on the mirror. It was back in its frame and wrapped in my cloak. None of us had wanted to risk looking into it, not even Deekin. Not after seeing what had happened to the last people to use it.

We headed back towards the quay where the ferryman waited. The movement of the river through its tunnel had kicked up a nice little breeze, and as I walked, I packed the air into a ground-skimming platform and ambled along it. I wasn't sure what I was accomplishing, but it was comforting to have some wind to play with, and it was actually rather pleasant to walk on. Sort of cushiony. "How long have we been here?" I murmured. I scowled up at the gloomy stone far over our heads. "I can't tell the time in this place."

Deekin, trotting along at my heels, shrugged. "Dunno. But Deekin never really pay much attention to that. Back in kobold caves, we just measured time by the length of old Boss's naps."

"The drow have candles they light at the beginning of each day," Valen offered. "They are made to burn down to the stubs over the course of a surface day. Here, however…" He looked up and shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

I shuddered. "Doesn't it bother you?"

"Not really," the tiefling answered, a note of surprise in his voice. "Why should it? Ways to measure time are as many and varied as the places that measure it." A faint, rueful smile touched his pale lips. "And I have spent so much time in so many places that I suppose I have long since given up on trying to keep track of it."

I blinked and looked at him sidelong. How old was he? I realized that I couldn't really tell. His face was unlined, so he wasn't that old, but he had a self-assurance and gravitas that said he was no whippersnapper. At a guess, I would have put him in his thirties, early forties at the outside, but that was assuming that tieflings even aged like normal humans. For all I knew, he could just be a really well-preserved four hundred. "That's a pretty easygoing way of looking at it," I said, looking forward again before he noticed my assessment.

He shrugged. "It saves me a lot of headaches."

I was quiet for a while, thinking. Here we were, the parole officer and his unwanted parolee, almost being civil to each other. Maybe we'd accidentally glanced in that mirror without realizing it, and it had turned us both into people who didn't completely hate each other's guts. "So," I said thoughtfully. "Where've you been that-"

A shout and running footsteps cut me off in mid-sentence. "Wait!" a voice cried.

All three of us turned. I had a wind wall up and Enserric down before I had time to think about what I was doing, Valen had his flail ready even before I'd finished moving, Deekin's crossbow was cocked and loaded, and I had a second to reflect what a jumpy bunch of jaded motherfuckers we were before I recognized the figure coming towards us.

It was Lomylithrar the Rotting, although now he looked more like Lomylithrar the Broken. His sadistic smile was gone, swallowed in an expression of drawn horror, and he walked barefoot and limping like a penitent. "Please," he said. He stopped and held his hands out, palms-up. They were filthy. "A word. I beg of you."

Valen and I exchanged glances before the tiefling shifted his stare back to the elf. I recognized the look. He'd turned it on me a few times. It was deeply suspicious, openly hostile, and his blue eyes had gone as cold as a January sky. "Is this some kind of trick?" he growled. "Why are you here? What do you want? Why did you not leave with your people?"

The avariel collapsed into a huddled, shivering ball of shattered nerves. The gory stubs of his wings rose just above his narrow shoulders. The symbol of Talona was gone from his neck. "How could I?" he asked. Misery dripped from his voice. " _Look_ at me."

I had to admit, he looked pretty pathetic, but the memory of our last encounter was still fresh, and I had a hard time looking at him without my skin crawling and the memory of bile searing my throat. "I see you," I said grimly. I grounded Enserric, the sword's point resting lightly on the stone between my feet and my hands clasped on the hilt. "What do you want?"

The elf stared at me, his face going so white that the scars on his cheeks stood out like fresh wounds. "From you? Nothing. I deserve nothing but your despite." Even his voice had changed. All of its edge was gone, and now it was as soft as goosedown and as frail as an old woman's. He stumbled forward, reaching out. "I…I only beg-"

Valen stepped between me and the erstwhile Talontar and planted a hand on the elf's chest, stopping him in his tracks. "You will come no closer," he said, his voice low and rasping and promising all kinds of unpleasant things if the elf disobeyed him. "You have done this woman enough harm."

Lomylithrar flinched and bowed his head. "I mean no harm," he said meekly. "I have done enough of that." He wrung his hands. "I have spread filth and disease in the name of a vile goddess." Tears began running down his face. "I have destroyed myself. I have destroyed others. I have failed my people in every conceivable way. I do not deserve to fly among them under the open sky." His face crumpled in pain, and his wing stumps moved in a wretched echo of what they must have been before. "I…I cannot even fly, and Aerdrie has forsaken me for my crimes. How can I go back?"

I stared down at the guy, feeling helpless. "I…" I had no idea what to say.

Valen frowned. Slowly, he took his hand away from the avariel's chest. "What _do_ you want, priest? Truly. Is it forgiveness? You will never get that. Believe me." For just a moment, a deep weariness wrote its lines in his face. "Perhaps Rebecca here may even forgive you, in time, but the people you killed never will."

Lomylithrar slumped to the ground, shaking his head. "I know," he whispered. He clasped his hands as if in supplication. "Please. I…I have no right to ask anything of you, no power to lend to your aid. If you wish to slay me where I stand, it would be your right. Strike me down, if you will. End my miserable life. Cast me in the river, let me drown. I have earned all that and more." He took a shuddering breath. "But if you will not kill me, I beg of you, take me with you and find some use for me, so that I might atone in some small way for what I have done to you. I cannot bear to stay alone in this dark place."

I stared at him, helpless. What did he want? Salvation? I couldn't even save myself. Comfort? I was no good at being comforting. Forgiveness? I poked around in my heart and flushed. No – I didn't have it in me to forgive and forget. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not ever. "I'm sorry," I said. "Look. I'd like to help." In spite of everything, the thought of this guy sitting all alone in his misery on this barren rock damn near broke my heart. "But I don't know what you want. I don't even know what I can do for you. I…I guess you could come with us, but…"

Valen was staring at the ex-priest. His expression had softened slightly. "I think I know of someone who may be able to help you," he said slowly. His eyes narrowed. "But be aware that I will be watching you. If you so much as look as if you might betray us…"

Lomylithrar stared back up at him, then bowed his head, tears spilling down his cheeks. "Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. I swear, I will not betray you."

Valen subjected the priest to another long, searching stare, then extended his hand. "Very well. Come with me."

I narrowed my eyes at Valen, confused. "Who are you thinking of bringing him to?"

The tiefling helped the priest to his feet. "The Seer," he said shortly. He gave Lomylithrar a gentle shove. "Walk ahead of me. No sudden moves."

My jaw dropped. Automatically, I followed as Valen led the way to the shoreline and Cavallas. "The Seer?" I hissed. "You're bringing him to the Seer? After the fuss you made over _me_?"

Valen shot me a surly stare. His tail lashed once. "There is a difference."

"Which is?"

Valen stabbed a finger towards me. " _You_ are a special case. You have as much potential to help us as to destroy us." He nodded towards Lomylithrar. "He is…expendable. I will be watching him, and if the Seer senses any evil intent in him, I shall kill him on the spot. If not…" His words trailed off into a shrug. His voice softened. "She saved me from worse circumstances. Perhaps she can save him, too."

I managed to pull my jaw off of the ground long enough to stagger after him. "You really care a lot about her, don't you?" I asked at last.

Valen spared me a quick and unreadable backwards glance. "She saved me in almost every way a person can be saved, and asked for nothing in return," he said simply, looking ahead again. "If anyone can help Lomylithrar, it will be her."

I stared after him, my feet temporarily glued to the ground. _Charity? From the man who threatens people with beheading for annoying him? Now I've seen it all._

Cavallas was standing by his boat, being weird. I didn't think he'd moved an inch in all the time we'd been away. I wondered if he ate. Probably not, and if he did, he probably ate things like slugs and earwigs and the dreams of children.

Valen pushed Lomylithrar up the gangplank before following him up. Recovering my wits, I stomped after them. "All aboard the H.M.S. Creepy," I muttered. I found a sheltered corner and dropped gratefully onto the deck, pulling Enserric across my lap. My legs were shaking again and my head was swimming. My fever was gone, but the damage it had done to my system and the blood loss from the otyugh's blow obviously weren't going to go away without some rest.

Deekin settled down next to me, a slight, warm weight nestled against my side. "How you doing, Boss?"

I draped an arm over the little bard's skinny shoulders and glanced over at the others. "Fine."

The kobold bobbed his head. "Uh-huh." He eyed me shrewdly. "So, what kind of fine be this? It be fine fine, or it be I don't wanna talk about it fine?"

An involuntary chuckle rose in my throat. "You know me too well, sweetie," I murmured. I raised my voice as Cavallas pulled in the gangplank. "To Lith My'athar, Cavallas. If anything nasty turns up, tell it to kindly fuck off until I'm done with my nap."

The ferryman bowed. Something about the gesture seemed ironic, but maybe it was just me. "As you wish, Wayfarer," he hissed, and turned to do his obscure sailor-y things.

I tried to make myself comfortable, an effort that was somewhat complicated by the fact that I didn't dare take my hand off Enserric's hilt or lie down, just in case anything happened. "Keep an eye out, Deeks. Wake me up if we get attacked by cave alligators or something. You too, Enserric."

Deekin grinned. "Will do, Boss."

Enserric glittered. "Perhaps a nice alligator will rid me of the taste of otyugh. Pfaugh. That was _revolting_."

"Poor baby. I'll find you some breath mints as soon as we get back."

"What an absurd idea."

"So's the idea that I'm gonna take you alligator hunting." I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. "Now shut up and let me sleep."

The strange sounds and movement of the boat and the echoes of the underwater river both lulled me into sleep and flung me out of it, by turns.

Voices floated softly over my head, coming to me in patches through the fog of half-sleep.

"Tell me of the Seer and Eilistraee," Lomylithrar was saying in his broken voice. "Please."

Valen spoke slowly. "The Seer is a drow woman who follows Eilistraee, the goddess of those drow who wish to abandon the evil ways of Lolth and return to the surface."

"She helped you?"

The ferry creaked for a while. "Yes," Valen's voice drifted to me, after a time. "I…was a battle-slave before this. I was forced to fight until it was all I knew. I became more beast than man. The Seer…she brought me back to myself." I heard a clink and rattle as he shifted. "She healed me, not in body but in spirit. I believe she may be able to do something similar for you."

Lomylithrar's breathing was a little watery. He sniffled. "You, too, were made slave to a cruel master."

"Yes."

Water rippled past the hull for a while. "I am sorry."

"It was what it was. As the Seer likes to tell me, we have no control over our past, only over what we do in the present moment, and for the present, I am…well enough."

Lomylithrar's voice was wistful. "She sounds very wise."

Something a lot like love softened Valen's voice. "She is."

I drifted away again, floating uneasily through half-formed dreams of smoke and blood and blue-eyed demons in cages.

Later, I didn't know much later, something pulled me out of sleep and back into a light doze.

"…called her Windwalker," I heard Valen saying, his voice faint and far away to my ears. "That sounds like a title."

"It is one of the titles of a priest of Shaundakul. Yes."

"What do you know of this Shaundakul?"

Lomylithrar sighed. "Very little."

Valen's voice was wry. "More than I."

"I am not surprised that you do not know of him. The Helping Hand's followers number only in the hundreds. Scarce thousands, at best. I only know of him because a Windwalker…visited me sometimes. Befriended me." Lomylithrar's voice broke. "At my temple, when I served…" Several choked breaths turned into a sob. "I…I apologize."

Valen's voice was almost gentle. "Take your time."

Lomylithrar coughed and sniffed. "Thank you."

Silence fell, and I sank into darkness again until a soft clink brought me back.

"…the god of the four winds and of all those who are drawn to roam like the wind does," the avariel's gentle tenor was explaining. "Traveling merchants, rangers, explorers…"

There was a soft, sudden thump. Valen's voice sounded strange. There was surprise in it, but there was also something else I couldn't quite figure out. "She is an explorer? A traveler?"

"All Windwalkers are. They are charged to wander wherever the wind blows, discover undiscovered places, and aid those in need along the way." The elf took several steadying breaths, still sniffling slightly. "My…my friend was a kind soul." There was a sudden, tiny chuckle. "He was rather…rough-and-tumble, I will admit, and his moods could be unpredictable, and his communion with his god was…surprisingly profane. But he was…a good man, in his own way. Good company. Our…our faiths were not dissimilar. We saw eye to eye on many things, and on those we did not, we could argue without rancor." The elf's voice lowered. "I…I am glad he cannot see me now."

"Hmm." Ropes groaned and water whispered past the hull as Valen fell into pensive silence. "She is a wanderer, then. That explains..." He trailed off. There was another pause. Armor clinked. "It sounds as if this Shaundakul is a benevolent god."

"I…I think so, though I think his benevolence does not extend to the cruel. My friend…he was a deeply moral man, make no mistake, but…we argued many times over his willingness to do things, in the name of the greater good, that I could not condone, no matter the outcome."

Valen's voice was thoughtful. "Benevolence for the benevolent, and cruelty for the cruel?"

"In essence, yes. I think that was it." The elf's voice fell to a whisper. "I…I remember hating her…hating your friend when I saw his sign around her neck. Hating the…the compassion and lust for life I knew in my own friend. Hating all the things that were good in the world, and loving everything I had always abhorred." His voice became muffled, as if he'd buried his face in his hands. "What have I done?"

The guilt and pain in that wail chased me back down into troubled dreams.

* * *

Cavallas poled his barge slowly to the river quay of Lith My'athar, passing between two dripstone pillars like enormous, half-melted candles.

I reached out as we went by and let my fingers drift along one of the pillars. It was smooth and cold and the color of milk, streaked here and there with rust-red stains.

The otherworldly lights of the drow city came twinkling into view. I stood at the prow of the boat and watched the upside-down reflection of Lith My'athar ripple on black water. A cool breeze ruffled my hair. I smiled.

Footsteps came up behind me, interrupting my thoughts. "We may have a small problem," Valen's voice announced without preamble.

I turned slightly, just enough to look over my shoulder at him. "A small problem? This isn't like Cavallas being _slightly unsettling_ , is it?"

A sudden half-smile flickered across the redhead's face. "Perhaps," he admitted. A faint grimace replaced the smile. "It is Lomylithrar. He is a surface elf. The hatred between the drow and the elves of the surface world runs deep. Most of the drow in Lith My'athar will want to kill him on sight. We will have to find some way to conceal his presence here."

I stared at him in shock. Then I turned back to the city and stared at it in shock, too. "Shit. I hadn't thought of that."

I heard a creak of leather and clink of metal, hinting that the tiefling had just shrugged. "It could not be helped. He would have died on that island, regardless." He paused. "And there is a positive side to this."

"There is? Good. I like positive sides. What's the positive side?"

"Normally, any surface elves that come into the hands of the drow are tortured and sacrificed in Lolth's name. With Lolth gone, that is not likely to occur."

I contemplated the pretty sparkling lights of Lith My'athar. "Will they still torture and kill him?"

Valen's voice was bland. "Probably."

"So they'll just torture and kill him without the religious ceremony. This is what you're telling me."

"Yes."

My elbows hit the boat's railing. Then my forehead hit my hands. "Jeez. If this is what you call a small problem, I don't want to know what you'd consider a big one."

Valen's voice went from bland to dry. "Probably not."

A hand tugged on my sleeve. "Maybe Deekin can help, Boss. I could sing the elf invisible. Then we could hustle him up to the Seer, easy peasy."

I frowned. "Yeah. But we can't keep him invisible forever. What happens if word gets around that the Seer is sheltering a surface elf?" If the city wasn't entirely on her side now, that little revelation wasn't likely to help matters.

"Dunno. Deekin was hoping Boss could figure that part out."

If that wasn't optimism, I didn't know what was. "Well, he's here and we can't just drop him in the river." I sighed. "Do your thing, Deeks, and we'll hustle."

The boat bumped into the quay, and I swung my cloak over Lomylithrar hurriedly – a little too hurriedly. My hand bumped his wing stump, and I felt him jerk and heard him bite back a little cry of agony. I clapped a hand over my mouth. "Shit, I'm sorry," I whispered. _Good job, Rebecca. Grab the man by his dismembered limbs_. _Maybe you could knock him into the poisonous, flesh-eating river for good measure_ , _how about it?_ "Are you okay?"

"I…I will be fine." Avoiding my eyes, he gathered the cloak around himself, very gingerly, and took a sideways step away from me. "T-thank you."

Deekin unslung his cymbals from his pack, and as soon as Cavallas dropped the gangplank, the kobold started banging his cymbals arrhythmically and chanting in a language I didn't recognize.

Valen's head reared back. "This is your idea of inconspicuous, kobold?"

"Look on the bright side," I muttered to him. "With Deeks making that racket, nobody's gonna be paying attention to Lomylithrar."

Some of the horror left the tiefling's face. "You may have a point," he conceded reluctantly. His disgruntled expression lingered. "But he is still an appallingly bad singer."

I winced as a particularly loud screech echoed across the street. The problem wasn't even that Deeks tried to hit the right notes and failed, it was that he didn't bother with trying to hit any notes in the first place. "No argument there."

We made our way through the streets. Luckily, they weren't too crowded, making me think that we'd arrived during what passed for night-time down here. Valen kept a surreptitious hand on the invisible avariel. I was impressed – the tiefling's wooden expression didn't slip once during the entire walk, giving no indication that anything fishy was going on. The man had a hell of a poker face.

The temple was as quiet as the streets. I led the way to the Seer's quarters without thinking and rapped on the door, a nervous rat-a-tat-tat.

The Seer opened the door almost before I'd finished knocking. Her smile was as warm as a woolly blanket. "Be welcome," she said, and stepped aside, holding the door open. "I have been expecting you."

I was pretty sure the whole I've-been-expecting-you schtick was just for effect, but I didn't argue. "Well met, Seer," I greeted her, and stepped into the room. Then I stopped, blinking. There was a lived-in coziness to the Seer's chambers that reminded me, suddenly and powerfully, of Drogan's house. I didn't know how I hadn't noticed it before, but now that I had, I couldn't seem to un-notice it. There was even a faint smell of old books and dried flowers, just like Drogan's. Swallowing, I held out the avariels' mirror. "H-here. This is for you. I don't know how useful it'll be, but it brought a whole city of avariel into the Underdark, so it's definitely powerful. Also…" I turned. "Deeks. You can stop now."

The kobold stopped singing. Lomylithrar faded into visibility. He was white-faced and visibly trembling.

Valen laid a hand on the elf's shoulder. "Stay where you are," he told Lomylithrar. His attention turned to the Seer. "Mother Seer," he said, and he gave her a respectful bow. "I apologize for the intrusion. We have brought you someone in need of your help, or so he claims."

The Seer nodded, her eyes on the avariel's face. She stepped forward, her slender black hands lifting in a slow and gentle motion to curl around the avariel's fragile shoulders. "Be welcome in my sight," she said, her voice soothing. Her eyes searched his face. "You are badly wounded, _Aril'tel'quessir,_ in soul as much as body."

Lomylithrar ducked his head, as if he couldn't bring himself to meet her eyes. "You are she," he whispered. "The Seer of Eilistraee."

The Seer smiled wryly. "I am," she said, and brushed a stray lock of the avariel's black hair away from his face with gentle fingertips. "For whatever that is worth."

The avariel drew in a breath. Then he fell to his knees. "Help me," he begged, tears filling his eyes. "Please. I do not know what to do."

The Seer raised her eyebrows. "Neither do I," she admitted. "None of us do. We just make our best guess and pray that it is the right one." She touched the backs of her fingers to his forehead, like a mother checking her child for a fever. "But I will try to help you find your way, if I am able." Her fingers brushed his temple. Then, gently, she leaned down and kissed his forehead. "Sleep, child of Aerdrie," she murmured. The avariel's eyes fluttered shut, and he slumped the rest of the way to the ground, eased in his fall by the Seer's surprisingly strong hands. When he was down, the Seer turned to Valen. "Please, be gentle with him. He is living a waking nightmare. By Eilistraee's grace, I have given him a dreamless sleep, but it will take more than that to heal what ails him."

Valen bowed. His blood-colored hair slipped forward, masking his expression. "Thank you, Seer," he said simply. "What would you like done with him?"

"Take him to a comfortable chamber," the Seer said. She looked down at the avariel and sighed. "Something airy, if you can. I cannot give him back the sky, but at least I can give him space to breathe." She looked up. "When he wakes, bring him to me, and we shall talk. For now, let him sleep."

Valen bowed again, then knelt and lifted the sleeping avariel, moving slowly and with great care in order not to jostle Lomylithrar's maimed wings. Then he hesitated, looking at me.

The Seer caught his look and smiled. "I will see to her while you tend to our new friend. Go in peace, dear Valen."

Valen hesitated a few moments longer. Then he nodded. His eyes lingered on my face, unreadable. "As you wish, Seer." Then he turned and left, cradling the fallen Lomylithrar as gently as if he were a sleeping child.

The door closed behind Valen. I watched him go, feeling strangely off-kilter. Nothing about Valen's waspish temperament or his grim demeanour suggested that he knew how to be gentle, and yet there he was, doing it. I had no idea what to think about that. I had no idea what to think of him at all, at this point.

I felt a light touch on my hand. "Deekin gonna go, too, Boss," the kobold told me in a loud whisper. "It been a long…whatever. You be okay here?"

I nodded, a little surprised that the kobold wasn't worried about leaving me alone with the Seer. Then again, for some reason, I wasn't all that worried, either. "I'll be fine. Sweet dreams, Deeks."

"You too, Boss," the kobold returned, and slipped out of the door with a flick of his tail.

The Seer turned to me, a smile curving her lips. "Please," she said, and gestured to the sofa before crossing the room to what appeared to be her ever-present teapot. "Sit. You are exhausted."

I hesitated. "I'm kind of a mess, and I was taught not to track otyugh onto people's sofas. But I'm fine. Really."

The Seer shot me a shrewd look. "Is that why you are swaying like a tree in a storm?"

She had me there. Sighing, I placed the mirror carefully on a side table and sat on the very edge of the sofa. "You might want to be careful if you try to use that mirror," I advised. "The queen of the avariel was using it to scry when she spied on Halaster. He sent them down here in revenge. It's why they were on that island in the first place. I don't even know if we even fixed it right – they helped us put it back together in order to get them out of there, but after finding out what it did to those guys, I didn't even try looking into it."

The Seer passed me a teacup of something that smelled herbal. She glanced at the cloth-covered mirror, her eyes troubled. "I can feel its power. I do not doubt that it will be an invaluable tool against the Valsharess, though I do not think I will dare to look into it until I have prepared myself and asked for Eilistraee's guidance."

I lifted the teacup to my lips and breathed in its steam. It smelled like mint. I took a cautious sip, and found that it tasted like mint, too. "I hope so," I murmured. "I'd hate to think that whole trip was just a waste of time."

The Seer sat next to me, her own teacup in hand. "Will you tell me of what you found?"

I stared into my tea. The fragrant warmth of it and the hominess of the room were having a weird effect on me. I could feel some kind of tension between my shoulder blades unwinding. With a sigh, I gathered my thoughts and gave the Seer a synopsis – editing out the fact that I'd almost killed Lomylithrar and, oh, a few other things, like my more uncharitable thoughts about the tiefling of whom she was unaccountably fond.

The Seer listened quietly. I'd never talked to someone who listened quite like she did, although Drogan had come close. She didn't say anything, but her attention never wavered, and I had the sense that every word I said was being heard, considered, and carefully tucked away into some mental filing cabinet with my name on it. "I see," she said when I was done. "And I am heartened. You did well."

I snorted into my tea, making its surface ripple. "I sent some avariel back to the surface, brought your forces a sickly ex-cleric who faints if anyone looks at him cross-eyed, and found a magic mirror that turns people into their evil opposites." I sighed. "Sounds like a waste of time to me."

The Seer nodded. "If I may, I would like to rephrase what you have just said."

I eyed her over my tea before deciding to humor her. "Go on."

"You have rescued a city of innocents from a terrible fate and restored them to their homes. You have brought us a new ally who, while weakened by grief, may prove himself an invaluable friend before this is over. And, last but not least, you have found us a powerful tool with which we may be able to divine the movements of the Valsharess and her allies, and thus stay one step ahead of them." The Seer took a tranquil sip of tea. "All in all, I would rate that a good start."

The protestation came to my throat almost instantly. "I didn't do it alone." If I'd tried, I would be dead by now. "And bringing you Lomylithrar was Valen's idea, not mine."

The Seer chuckled. "I am not surprised." She sighed. "As much as Valen believes that his worth to others lies in his skill as a warrior, I have not yet succeeded in convincing him of the truth."

My eyebrows climbed. "Which is?"

The Seer smiled. "Which is that those of us who care for him do so for his bright heart and gentle soul, not for his strong right arm." Her smile turned rueful. "Though that, I will admit, has also been a blessing to us."

That strong right arm had sure as hell come as a blessing to me, although his attitude was more like a curse. "Yeah, well, we can hope my cold, black heart can do what gentle hearts can't," I muttered. Then I blinked. I had no idea where that had come from. It was the Seer's way of listening, that was what it was. She drew words out of you that you never had any intention of saying.

The Seer put her head to one side, studying me through a fall of snowy hair that had come loose from her chignon. "Would you like to know what I think?"

I stared into my tea. _Kind of yes, kind of no._ "What's that?"

The Seer's voice was light and gentle. "I think that your heart shines like the sun. You do not see it, because you stand at the sun's center, where the light is so bright that you take its dimmest reaches for darkness. But Eilistraee allows me to perceive where true darkness lies, and I tell you truly, Rebecca, I see none of it in you," she said. Then she gave a silvery little laugh. "I must confess, I envy you."

I gawked dumbly, trying and failing to make sense of everything – of anything - the Seer was saying. My teacup rattled in its saucer. "M-me?" I squeaked.

"Yes." She perched her teacup and saucer on her knee, her face pensive. "Eilistraee has granted me the gift of sight. She sends me dreams and visions, and I interpret them with what I hope is something approaching wisdom and use those insights to guide my people as best as I am able." Her teacup clinked as she leaned forward, her voice confiding. "But there is one thing Eilistraee has not seen fit to give me, and that Shaundakul has granted you."

I couldn't stop staring at her, and I couldn't decide if I was staring at her like she was a snake, or like I was a newborn gosling and she was my mommy. Maybe it was a bit of both. "W-what's that?"

The Seer smiled. "The power to _act_." She placed her hand on my knee, ignoring the filth that Talona's temple had left on me. "My love for my goddess nurtures me and my years have, if nothing else, taught me patience – but still, do you know how frustrating it can be to stay in my temple to dream while others go forth and _do_?" she asked, her voice impassioned. "You have that power, Rebecca. It is not for you to meditate on all possible futures, but to choose one future and then to go out into the world and to _make_ that future happen. Do you know how rare and wonderful a gift that is?"

My mouth opened and closed a few times. I wondered if I'd stepped through that mirror, into a world where wise old elves confessed that they envied bumbling thirty-something humans. I buried my face in my teacup, drinking deeply before I even tried to reply. "I, uh…hadn't thought of it that way."

The Seer's smile was a little impish. "I have, but then, I do spend so much of my time sitting and thinking." With one last pat on my knee, she leaned back. "Drink your tea, dear," she said, and for a moment she sounded so much like Linu I did a double-take. "Then I think perhaps you should seek your bed. You are clearly exhausted, and I have kept you from your rest long enough." She nodded towards the door. "When you are ready, I believe you will find a friend waiting for you."

I blinked at the Seer, then I blinked at the door, then I gave up on trying to figure out what was happening and just nodded. "All right," I said, and drank my tea.

When I bid the Seer goodnight and opened the door, a six-foot-plus wall of mithril and moodiness was waiting on the other side.

Valen stared at me. I stared at him. "Back so soon, sunshine?" I asked.

The tiefling scowled. "Yes, _my lady_." His eyes blazed at me, and his enunciation became very tight and precise, as if it was taking an extraordinary act of self-control to keep him from picking me up and throwing me down the hall like a human discus. "You have recently been infected with the plague and nearly disemboweled by an otyugh. You are clearly exhausted. I thought you might be in need of assistance, although now I suddenly find myself tempted to let you fall flat on your face."

I flushed. I was tempted to argue, but he…wasn't actually wrong. Damn him. "Fine. I'll come with you. Lead on." I followed him into the hall, right before I stumbled over what I would have liked to think of as a fold in the carpet, only the floor was marble, so I could only conclude that what I'd actually stumbled over was my own feet.

Valen glanced at me, half-putting out a hand as if to catch me. "Are you all right?"

I grunted. "I'm fine, just tired."

The tiefling nodded curtly. "Understood." To my surprise, he slowed his pace as if to accommodate my invalid status. He glanced at me as we walked. "With your permission, I would like to take your armor to Rizolvir for repairs," he said, gesturing to the missing scales near my ribs. "I think it would be wise for you to take a day's rest before leaving the city again, and it would be ill-advised of you to fight with your armor in that state."

I flushed again, wondering how to explain that I didn't actually have any money. This was a new experience for me. I wasn't finding it an enjoyable one. "You are aware that the Valsharess stole most of my worldly possessions, including all of my money, right?" I tried.

Valen almost missed a step. "No, actually."

I rubbed the back of my neck, looking down as if the floor was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen. It was marble. Nice marble. Well polished. Very, uh, marbly. "Yeah, well, she did, on the surface, right before trying to have me assassinated," I mumbled. And I doubted this Rizolvir worked on credit, although there was always the possibility of selling my body in exchange for armor repair. I usually gave it away for free, but hey, if he was okay-looking and was halfway decent in the sack I didn't see why we couldn't work something out. I'd even take bad-looking and decent in bed. Worst came to worst, all he had to do was snuff the candles. That was the thing about being a human in the Underdark: on the one hand, once the lights were off, you couldn't see shit, but on the other hand, maybe there were times when that was a good thing.

Valen had gone quiet, and stayed quiet several paces before speaking again. "I will speak to the Seer," he said at last. "I am sure she will agree to spare some of our own resources to cover the cost."

My flush deepened. "That's not why I…" I spluttered. It was one thing to fuck the blacksmith for freebies. It was another to accept charity. At least in the former case I could argue that I'd earned it. "You don't have to-"

A mulish frown settled over the tiefling's face. "Yes, I do," he said, in a tone that brooked no argument. "You may or may not be the savior the Seer envisions, but you certainly will not be able to help us if you are dead because you lacked adequate protection."

I was too tired to argue. Again. "Fine." We got to my door and stopped. "Take it. Ask Rizolvir what he can do." I opened the door, a little carefully in case there were any drow assassins hiding behind it. You never knew, but the room seemed empty and Enserric didn't yell anything about hidden life forms, so I walked in, letting out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding. I wouldn't exactly have called my chambers a safe haven, but at least there was a bed and a bathtub and nothing immediately trying to kill me. "Ahh," I sighed, finally setting Enserric down and rolling my shoulders to take the stiffness out. "Home, sweet home."

Valen leaned against the doorframe, lingering on the threshold like a cat who wasn't sure whether he wanted in or out. "A strange sentiment, all things considered," he observed.

I shrugged. "I've got a flexible definition of home, these days." I finished unbuckling my right bracer and dropped it on a side table. "Been a while since I've slept in the same place more than three days in a row." I laughed. "And a four poster bed? That's luxury. Most times it's a blanket and some nice, soft moss, if I'm lucky." My smile faded as the memory of nights under the surface sky – the wind in my hair, my head full of the sweet smell of grass or the heady spice-scent of the desert or the earthy scent of loam or the rich perfume of the jungle, and always, always, the sun shining or the stars twinkling overhead – hit me, all at once. My head throbbed, and my heart ached.

The tiefling studied me appraisingly. "I understand that you are something in the nature of a professional traveler."

I smiled, a little flash of amusement cutting through my dour mood. "Yeah," I said, and tugged my left bracer free before tossing it to join its mate. "I heard you and Lomylithrar talking."

It was hard to tell in the dim light, but I thought I saw a faint flush rise in Valen's cheeks. "I thought you were asleep."

"I was," I said, undoing my traveling belt. "Kind of hard to sleep sitting up on a boat, though, so it was less like sleeping and more like dozing." I laid my belt over my bracers. "If you're that curious, next time you want to know about Shaundakul, just ask me. I can probably tell you more than Lomylithrar."

Valen raised his eyebrows. "I might take you up on that, one of these days," he murmured. He paused, a certain discomfort appearing in the set of his eyes and mouth. "I imagine that you heard the rest of our conversation, then."

I pulled my scale mail over my head. Then I looked at it and grimaced. It was covered in blood, goo, and had a big tear across it, with about half a dozen scales missing. "Some of it," I admitted, setting the shirt down near my bracers. Then I began unlacing the tight leather coat I wore under my mail. "I did hear the part where the Seer saved you from being a pit slave." _Which explains how you turned a drow ambush into a pile of bodies in about five seconds flat._

Valen frowned at the floor. "That is not entirely accurate." His hand came up and rubbed the back of his neck. "The truth is…rather more complicated than that."

I looked at him. He was outlined in the light from the hall and made for a very striking silhouette, with his regal horns and his pale profile like the bust of some ancient god and his eyes so bright blue they shone even through the dark. "So what is the truth?" I asked.

He looked at me sidelong for a long moment, then sighed. "Perhaps it would be best if you knew," he muttered. "Perhaps then you might understand."

I looked back at him. I was exhausted, but I had a sense that if I rejected his offer of truth now, I'd never get a second chance. Besides, maybe if I knew where he came from I could figure out how to deal with him without wanting to snap one of his horns off and shiv him with the fucking thing. I heaved a sigh. "Well, don't stand there, come in," I said, not entirely graciously. There were two chairs in the room, comfortable wing chairs with overstuffed cushions. I threw my leather coat aside, sank into one chair wearily, and gestured at the other chair. "Have a seat, but even if you don't, I hope you don't mind if I do. It's either that or fall on my face, like you so helpfully pointed out."

Valen hesitated and made as if to go. "You need rest. Perhaps I should-"

I swatted his objection down with an irritated wave of my hand. "Sit," I ordered, and for a second, I could have sworn the ghost of my dad had taken over my tongue for the second time in almost as many days, because without my actually meaning it to, my voice took on an eerily familiar tone that I used to call daddy's 'boardroom' voice and my friend Jeff had called his 'Genghis Khan in bespoke tailoring' voice. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, which felt gritty and hot. My voice softened. "Please. I'd offer you a drink, but the Valsharess stole that, too."

The tiefling stayed standing, stiff-necked, stiff-shouldered, and stiff-backed. "I do not drink."

Well, that officially confirmed it: this guy was about as fun as a hole in the head. I bit back a sigh and took a swig from my waterskin, shrugging. "Suit yourself."

Valen stood uncertainly in the center of the floor. He seemed to have defaulted to his soldierly posture, with the ramrod straight back, clenched buttocks, and all. "I am unsure how much knowledge you have of the planes," he began. He gave me a measuring look. "I suspect little, in which case the term, 'The Blood War' means nothing to you. Am I correct?"

He had me there. "You are."

The tiefling frowned. "How to explain," he murmured, as if to himself. He drew in a deep breath. "The Blood War…is the ages-old conflict between the demons of the Abyss and the devils of Baator. Our legions are numberless, and there is no true hope of winning, only an endless cycle of rage and bloodshed that has gone on for so long that now it is in our blood."

My head swam as I tried to absorb all that. What the hell was Baator? And there was a difference between demons and devils? I'd thought they were pretty much the same thing, and Drogan had never really gone into the details. Also…"Our?" I repeated blankly.

Valen hesitated. His gaze shifted to the floor and a grimace crossed his face, as if he'd realized he'd said something that maybe he shouldn't have. His next words came slowly and one at a time, as if he was picking them with utmost care. "Do you…know what a tiefling is?"

I looked at his horns. One of them was chipped along the outer edge, like it had been hit by something heavy or sharp or both. I hadn't noticed that before, maybe because the light had never fallen on it just right, or maybe because I was too tired to keep being polite and pretending I didn't notice that the man had actual horns on his actual head. "Sort of." No need to tell him I hadn't known until my sword clued me in. The guy probably already suspected I was a little dim. I wasn't about to confirm his suspicions. "But you're not actually a demon. You're just….part demon, right? From somewhere back in the family tree."

The tiefling seemed to relax, and I got the impression that he'd been expecting an altogether different reaction – a vase thrown at his head, maybe, or me jumping out of my chair and running away, screaming, down the hall. I could've told him he was getting worried over nothing. There was no way I was getting out of this chair unless somebody set it on fire, and even then I'd probably need a minute to think about it. "Yes," he admitted. He wasn't as stiff, but the set of his shoulders and a subtle tension drawing down the corners of his mouth said he was still uncomfortable. "Does that bother you?"

I had to laugh. "No more or less than anything else I've seen and heard over the past few years." And really, this wasn't any crazier than people shooting fireballs from their hands, or people living to be a eight hundred years old, or one of my best friends being a three-foot-tall talking lizard, or, hell, me being able to walk on thin air or call lightning down from the sky. After a certain point, you just had to roll with it. "Why? Should it bother me? Does it make you evil or something?" I studied him pensively. "You don't seem evil to me. Just bad-tempered and about as friendly as a kick in the teeth."

Valen spluttered. "I…ah…" He trailed off, seeming at a loss. Then he cleared his throat. His voice was a little faint. "Well. That was…blunt."

I smiled briefly. "I think the word you're looking for is 'tactless'. Sorry. I try not to be, but I fail. A lot."

After a moment, Valen returned my shrug. "Do not be sorry," he said. A faint, wry smile touched the corner of his lips. "Better an honest insult than a dishonest compliment."

"It wasn't meant as an insult."

"Oh? What was it, then?"

I smiled again. "An observation." I swirled the skin and polished off the last of the water. "So, you fought in this Blood War?"

Valen's smile vanished. He nodded. "I was taken to the Abyss and enslaved by a powerful balor named Grimash't. Tieflings make useful fodder and foot soldiers in the War, since our demonic blood can be encouraged to manifest itself, and no one inquires too closely when a tiefling goes missing."

I blinked. "Why the hell not?"

Valen's forehead furrowed, and he stared at me as if I'd just asked why the sky was blue. "Because we are tainted by the Abyss, and as far as most people are concerned, the Abyss is where we belong," he said, as if it were obvious. "No one _cares_ what befalls the damned, Windwalker."

I realized my jaw was hanging open. I shut it. "That's terrible," I said weakly.

Valen shrugged, his voice distant. "It is what it is." His thumb stroked the hilt of his flail, an idle gesture or maybe a nervous one. "At any rate, they are not entirely wrong. Violence and rage are in our blood, and pain draws it out. Typically, raw recruits are tortured until they snap. Once that happens, they are thrown into battle. If they survive, they are granted a reprieve from the pain, sometimes even rewarded lavishly. If they die or try to rebel against their master…" He trailed off, then uttered a brief, black bark of a laugh. "Well, there are always more where that one came from."

My lips parted. No sound came out, at first. Words didn't seem adequate to the horror story he was telling, although none of it was quite as blood-curdling as the detached way he described his own torment. "I'm sorry," I said at last. "That sounds…well, it sounds like hell."

A humorless smile twisted the tiefling's lips. "Yes," he agreed. He looked down for a moment, seeming to marshal his thoughts. When he spoke, it was haltingly. "After I was taken, I fought in the Blood War for years. I do not know how long. A decade, at least. Likely more." He touched his face, briefly. "All I know is that I was very young when I was taken, and now…I am not so young." Then he took a deep breath. "At first I fought only to survive. After a while, though, fighting became all I knew. I lived to win, to slaughter my enemies, to glory in my victory. There was nothing left in me that was human, and that meant less than nothing to me." He drew in a breath, then released it. "Until I met the Seer."

I frowned in confusion. "How? Did she come to the…the Abyss, I guess it would be?"

He shook his head. "No. We…had been called to fight her, summoned to this plane by the spell of a drow priestess. I was eager to fight, but when it came time to face the Seer, she…looked into my soul." He avoided my eyes and shrugged. "I am sorry. I have no other way to describe it. It was as if she saw me, truly saw me, and in so doing, forced me to see myself." Muscles along his jaw rippled. "I did not like what I saw."

I thought I knew what he meant. The Seer's midnight eyes had a way of looking right through you. "What did you do?"

He stared into the middle distance. "I was banished back to the Abyss when we were defeated, but the Seer haunted my dreams. For the first time in…I do not know how long, I started to remember the life I had once had. The person I had been, before the Abyss…erased him." An apparently unconscious shudder ran through him, even though his expression didn't change, to disturbing effect. His tail had wound its way around his leg from the inside of one knee and was now perfectly still – tucked, in the most literal sense, between his legs. "Grimash't sensed my difficulty. He caged me and he…punished me. I do not know for how long. It seemed like forever to me, but then, those things always do."

It was one thing to know that, in some distant and abstract way, Hell was an awful, awful place. It was entirely another to hear someone describe it firsthand. "How did you get out?" I whispered.

Valen shrugged. "Sheer, dumb luck," he admitted, matter-of-fact. "Grimash't had been holding me in a tower where he kept his valuables. It made for a tempting target. A rival force of tanar'ri – of demons – raided it. They had no interest in a broken slave, only in the balor's more…material treasures, but their attack broke the bars of my cage. I saw my chance to escape and took it. I knew it was likely to be the only chance I would ever get."

I stared at the man in front of me, standing there with his fierce blue eyes and stubbornly straight spine and proud horned head and calling himself broken, and suddenly, I was furious. "Tell me you killed that motherfucker on the way out."

Valen's head reared back slightly in surprise. "I…yes. Or rather, he came after me, and I fought him." A slow, strange smile spread across his face. His eyes flashed red. "And killed him. At long last."

I had to stop myself from spitting on the floor. "Good."

Valen's eyes mellowed to blue, and his tail slowly unwound itself from his leg. "You are…pleased?" he asked, as if he wasn't quite sure if he'd even understood himself correctly, much less me.

My snort was short and savage. "Hell yeah," I said wearily. _Sorry, Harry. I'm not you. I don't think I can ever be you. I'm just too damn mean._ "After what he did to you, he had it coming."

A brief curl at the corner of his lips was, I supposed, as close to a smile as the tiefling could come, under the circumstances. "You will hear no argument from me." He looked down briefly, frowning. "At any rate, I was able to escape," he went on. "Eventually, I found my way out of the Abyss and I sought out the Seer. She spoke to me, drew out the human in me and drove the demon – the nightmare - away." His face softened, the way it always seemed to when he talked about the Seer. "I owe her a debt I can never repay."

Pensive, I slouched back in my chair. "You know what I think?"

He gave me a sharp glance, there and away again. "What?"

I groped my way towards the right words. "I think…I think you don't give yourself enough credit."

Valen's eyes lingered a little longer on my face, this time, not quite so quick to dodge my eyes. "What do you mean?"

I shrugged. "You saved yourself, just as much as the Seer did," I answered.

He snorted. "I do not believe that."

"Don't you?" I asked rhetorically. I stabbed a finger at him, a little sloppily in my tiredness. "Think about it. For one thing, I don't buy that there was nothing human left in you, or else who was the Seer looking at? Plus, you knew you needed help, you wanted help, and you went looking for it, which isn't something mindless animals do. All the Seer did was give you a wake-up call." All that therapy dad had made me go to had taught me this much, if nothing else. "The Seer might have saved you, but you were the one who decided that you wanted to be saved in the first place. Without that, there wasn't a damn thing she could do. So give yourself a little credit."

The tiefling's head lifted. He blinked. "The Seer has told me much the same thing." He frowned. "It is…extremely difficult to think of it that way. But I am trying."

My lips twisted. "Yeah, years of beating yourself up don't go away in a day," I heard myself saying. I didn't know why. I'd barely even talked about this stuff with my friends, and this guy and I were definitely not friends. Then again, he had just told me his horror story. Fair was fair. "I wasn't in a good place when I-" _Came to this world._ "-met Shaundakul, either. Nowhere as bad as the Abyss-" - my mind shied away from even imagining what _that_ must have been like, - "-but I'd done a pretty good job of wrecking my life. If not for the help of him and some very good people, I'd probably be dead."

Valen was frowning pensively. "The Seer says much the same thing about Eilistraee. Her goddess gave her hope when she desperately needed it." Then he took a breath and seemed to gather himself. "Make no mistake," he said then, his voice strengthening. "I did not reveal any of this to you to earn your sympathy – or your pity. I only wanted you to understand what the Seer means to me. To us." He straightened. "I may not entirely believe in her cause or her visions, but I believe in her and would never betray her – no more than I would allow her to be betrayed."

He never gave up, did he? I might even have admired his determination if only he used it to be a pain in someone _else's_ ass. "I'm not going to betray the Seer," I growled. "I try not to hurt decent people." There was that, at least. Maybe vicious people had a way of bringing out my vicious streak, but I thought I was doing an okay job of keeping my worst impulses under wraps with everybody else. "You'd think you'd have figured that out by now."

Valen grimaced. "I am sorry. I…did not mean to make accusations."

My hackles settled. "Okay, then," I said. I tried to stand. I failed. "Oh, for fuck's sake. Could you help me up, please?"

He gave me a startled look – and it was an honest to god startled look, his bright blue eyes going so wide they looked in serious danger of popping right out of their sockets – and crossed the room to me in a couple of quick strides, grasping my forearm and hauling me upright.

I had to grab his arm with both hands to steady myself. "Thanks," I croaked. "Sorry. Think I need t'go t'bed."

Valen studied my face. He frowned. "I think you are right," he murmured, and guided me over to the bed. "Do you need anything?"

"Aside from about a year's worth of sleep? No," I answered. I gestured towards my discarded gear. "Take the armor. See what can be done." I paused. "And…thanks for telling me all that." I cleared my throat. "I won't tell anybody. Promise. I've got a big mouth, but not _that_ big."

After a moment, Valen inclined his head. "I…appreciate that," he said quietly.

The tiefling gathered my armor and leathers and left. The door clicked shut behind him. I stared at it, thinking.

 _So the tin man's got a heart after all. Who knew?_ And mine broke for him. No wonder he was so grim. He'd had a grim life.

I rubbed my face. _I need to sleep. The world will make more sense after I've slept. Maybe._

It wasn't until I was most of the way asleep that a realization hit me so hard it sent me rocketing upright. "He's not from this world," I blurted. His story, the weird way of speaking he had sometimes, the way he talked about this world almost like an outsider and didn't quite _fit_ – it all made sense now. "He's…" _Like me_. "From somewhere else."

Red light flickered in the dark. "Yes," Enserric said. "More than likely. Tieflings are more common in the planes, where demons and devils have freer rein to, ah, associate with mortals."

I gathered the sheets to my chest until I was practically holding a little bouquet of silk. "Oh." My face felt numb. I wondered where Valen came from. Was it anything like home, or was it someplace even stranger than here?

A vague hint of curiosity colored the sword's otherwise indifferent tone. "Will you tell him? About you?"

I jerked. Then I threw myself back down, burying my face in the pillow. "Hell, no!" I hadn't even told most of my closest friends _that_ secret. Like hell would I tell someone I barely knew and who'd made it clear he was no friend of mine. "Go to sleep, Enserric."

The sword grumbled a little to himself. "Goodnight, my dear, idiot wielder."

I yawned hugely and curled around my pillow. "Goodnight, you stuffy old prick."


	28. Learning Curve

_Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example._

\- Mark Twain, "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson"

~*~  
Chapter 28: Learning Curve  
~*~

I held up my old shirt. "Hello, future dust rag," I greeted it. Then I balled it up and threw it into the corner. "Damn it. I need new clothes."

Enserric snorted, which was a hell of an accomplishment for somebody without a nose. " _Now_ you realize this?" He heaved a long-suffering sigh. Then his tone brightened. "I have an idea. Why don't we go shopping? If coin is an issue, we can always kill something rich. A wyrm, perhaps. Just a small one. I am sure it will not be too much trouble."

I ground my teeth. "I am not going to fight a dragon just so you can have a swankier-looking wielder."

"But you are so _scruffy!_ It is mortifying to be seen with you," Enserric whined. "And you used to dress so well, too."

Somebody had obviously been rummaging through my memories again. I should probably have been more upset by that, and couldn't figure out why I wasn't. "Yeah, well, the operative words there are 'used to', and if anyone ever tries to make me wear heels again, I'll show that person why they call 'em stilettos." I pulled out the shirt Mhaere had given me. It didn't fit right, but it was better than having my skin chafed raw by my coat and armor. "Besides, my old shirt was fine before the big hole and all the bloodstains," I added.

"It was not fine. It was a disgrace." The sword's voice took on a theatrical cadence, like he was reciting his final soliloquy. "I would say that you should have killed the tailor to spare him the humiliation of knowing that his handiwork was roaming the world in such a state, but I fear it would be a useless effort, as the sheer magnitude of your sartorial sins would likely seep into the very earth to torment him until he rose from the dead to become a shambling, maddened revenant!"

I rolled my eyes. "Are you sure you used to be a mage?"

Enserric's tone returned to normal, or at least normal for him, which wasn't normal by normal standards but at least didn't sound like Laurence Olivier in a Pringles can. "Quite sure. Why do you ask?"

"'Cause you've got a hell of a talent for drama that's why. You could have made a fortune on the stage." From behind me, I heard the busy _scritch-scritch_ of a quill. Without looking, I pointed a finger at the source. "Deekin, do _not_ tell me that you're writing this down, or I swear I'll have Laele bake you into a pie."

Enserric's voice lowered to a mutter. "Hmph. Now who is being dramatic?"

The tip of a reptilian snout poked out from a small stonehenge of pillows. The snout had a smudge of ink across it. "Oh, come on, Boss," Deekin objected. "You said you wanted me to tell the truth. How Deekin gonna remember what you say if he not write it down?"

I glared at the snout. "I said I wished you'd told the truth in the last book, not that you'd write another one."

The snout vanished. "Don't worry, this one be way better, there be drow in it," the kobold's voice emerged from his shelter. "Now put some clothes on, Boss. You be making poor Deekin blush."

"Bullshit." I let my hand drop. "Nothing makes you blush, Deeks. Besides, what do you care about clothes? You don't even wear pants."

A quill scratched busily. "Got me there, Boss."

It occurred to me that I was in the Underdark with a whole lot of people out to kill me, and I was standing here bickering with a kobold and a sword about my wardrobe. "Enough. This is ridiculous," I muttered, and pulled my shirt over my head before shuffling over the thick carpets to check my reflection in the washstand mirror. I reached the mirror and adjusted it so I could see my full reflection. There was a brief spark when I touched the frame. It didn't hurt, to my surprise, but I could feel…something. I touched my hair. It crackled and clung to my fingers. I stared at my reflection and watched my own eyes widen. "Wait a minute," I said slowly.

Red ripples moved through Enserric. "What is it?"

"I'm…not sure." I remembered the vrocks in the wizard's tower. One had thrown lightning at me, and I'd been able to gather the residue of it out of the air and throw it back at him, somehow. I was used to lightning being ever-present in the sky, there if I needed to call it. Down here, I hadn't been able to find anything to grab – until that vrock's spell had provided me with a spark. I spun, my heart suddenly pounding with excitement. "Enserric. Can you tell what I'm thinking?"

That weird fluttering sensation went through my brain as the sword flipped through my thoughts. "Yes," he said, sounding startled. "Goodness, wielder. That is an inspired idea. Has some of my superior intellect finally leaked into your brain?"

"Could be." I looked down and scuffed my boot on the carpet, frowning thoughtfully. That didn't do much. It needed more. Abruptly, I crossed the room, shuffling my feet madly as I went. "I wish I had a balloon," I complained. "This'd be easier with a balloon. Or maybe a glass rod and a…a something." Distant memories of interminably dull sciences classes clamored for my attention. "Some kind of cloth. Wool? Silk? I can't remember."

Deekin's head poked out of the pillows again. He was squinting uncertainly. "Boss? What are you doing?"

I reached the end of the carpet and, careful not to lift my feet, turned around and started shuffling back. "Something insane."

The kobold blinked and bobbed his head. "Oh. So, normal Boss stuff. O-kay."

Frantically, I started rubbing my forearms against each other, trying to generate a little extra static. "One of you is a talking sword and the other's a singing lizard. Why do you all keep acting like I'm the strange one here?"

Deekin watched me shuffle past, rubbing my arms and legs against each other like I was a cricket. "No reason, Boss," he said, and retreated into his hidey-hole again.

"Keep going," Enserric encouraged. "I think something is happening."

He was right. There was an electric fizz building in the air immediately around me. I closed my eyes and held out my hand, trying to feel the little sparks buzzing around me and coax them to come settle in my palm. _Come on,_ I thought. _Come to mommy._ I felt my hair stir, the curls lifting and twining around each other like a nest of vipers. A tingle was gathering in my palm, a taste of ozone on the very tip of my tongue. _Just a little more…_

A tiny bolt of lightning jumped from my hand and earthed itself on the carpet, which caught fire.

I jumped. "Oh, crap!" There was a damp bath towel still hanging over one of the chairs. I whipped it off and flung it onto the burning carpet. Then I stamped on it, trying to tamp down the flame. "Crap, crap, crap."

Enserric's voice was resigned. "Ah. A return to form. Excellent."

I waved a hand in front of my face, coughing at the smell of burning fabric. "Come on, it's fine." I pointed. "It's stopped now. See?"

"It is still smoking."

I grabbed a pitcher of wash water and poured it over the rug. "There. Now it's not."

"Excellent. Now, how are you going to explain to the Seer what you have done to her priceless, hand-woven silk carpets?"

I coughed again. The smell really was awful, and there weren't even any windows I could open. "They're not hers, they're the temple's, and she can put it on my tab, along with the repairs to my armor and my funeral expenses."

"Yes, well, on the bright side, if you keep on like this you will most likely incinerate yourself, thus neatly solving the problem of what to do with your corpse."

"Come on, it worked." I held on to the memory of the little lightning bolt like a kid clutching a teddy bear. "I just need practice, that's all."

"Oh, _good_. I do so look forward to seeing what Lith My'athar looks like as a smoking crater."

"Shut up. I think this could work." Lightning was just electricity, and if there was electricity in the air, I could harness it the same way I did above ground. I just needed to figure out how to generate enough of it to be useful. I didn't think I was going to be able to kill the Valsharess with static cling.

The thought of the Valsharess made my stomach clench like a fist, and thoughts of the surface made Halaster's geas sink its claws into the back of my skull. I took a breath. Determinedly, I took all thoughts of the surface and the Valsharess and assassins, shoved them down as far as they'd go, and locked them away as tight as I could. I'd gotten through Undrentide by putting one foot in front of the other and focusing on one problem at a time. If I was going to get through this, it was going to be the same way. "I'll think more about this later. I need some fresh air. Fresher than this, anyway." I turned. "You coming, Deeks?"

Pages rustled. "Deekin gotta work on his notes, actually. You go, Boss. Deekin gonna go back to his room and get this all down while it be fresh."

"Fine," I said. A little finger-combing set my hair as much in order as it ever got. Then I slung my belt around my hips, grabbed Enserric, opened the door, and stuck my head out into the hallway.

There was a short-haired, scar-faced drow woman leaning against the opposite wall, cleaning her fingernails with the point of a dirk. "Hi, Quarra," I said. I looked up and down the hall. "Let me guess. You'll be my security detail for today?"

The drow scout looked up briefly, acknowledged me with a frown, then went back to cleaning her nails.

 _Wow. She must've gotten that sunny disposition from her boss._ I stepped out, absently wondering where Mister Sunshine had gone off to. Probably doing General-y things, or maybe just practicing his scowl in the mirror. A bitchy resting face of that caliber didn't come naturally. Probably took years of practice, which also explained why he smiled as if he couldn't quite remember how. Grandma would have loved to meet him, if only as proof that she'd been right all along – his face really _had_ frozen that way.

Smiling a little to myself, I looked around. Then, since no one seemed to be stopping me and now was as good a time as any to get the lay of the land around here, I ambled down the hallway to explore.

I found Nathyrra in the library, bent over a desk full of books and papers that were arranged with geometrical precision. She was alone, and from the amount of paper in front of her, she'd been that way for a while.

The former assassin looked up as I breezed through the door. She nodded. "Rebecca," she said politely, and blew some sand across a piece of parchment. The handwriting covering it made perfect straight lines. "It is good to see you. I heard that you were unwell."

I crossed to her desk and leaned my hip against it, glancing down at her books. They looked like spellbooks, or at least they had the same incomprehensible symbols I'd caught glimpses of in Drogan's spellbooks. "Who told you that?" I asked.

The drow capped her quill and laid it aside. She began to sort through papers, stacking them into perfectly square piles. "The Seer. So far, we have been able to contain the news. It is fortunate you arrived while much of the city slept. It kept the spread of rumor at a minimum." She cocked an eyebrow at me. "How do you feel?"

"Never been better," I said. My stomach growled. Recovering from Talona's plague and Enserric's brutal healing really must have been taxing my system. I'd slept like the dead, and now I was starving. "Have you eaten yet?"

Nathyrra looked down at her books and frowned. She set aside a pile of papers and re-opened the book beneath it. "I ate not that long ago."

I looked at her stacks of papers. They were pretty tall. "How long ago?"

The drow ran a slender finger down a page until she reached a funny squiggle halfway down. She tapped the symbol with her forefinger, then picked up her quill again. "I do not know," she said as she jotted down a few more notes. "The Seer woke me after you returned. Some time after then, I believe."

It had probably been a good eight hours since then. I couldn't believe it. I was in the presence of a real, live overachiever. I'd heard rumors about their existence, but I'd never been able to observe one in its native habitat. "Hey, I have an idea," I said brightly.

Nathyrra looked up, blinking. "What?"

I nodded at her quill. "Why don't you put that thing down and we go find some breakfast?" I saw a reluctant frown forming on her face, like clouds gathering on the horizon, and I hurried to add, "Or I can eat and you can watch. Whichever, just stop with all the studying, it's giving me flashbacks to co…to the academy."

The drow looked down at her notes, then nodded slowly. "I suppose you are right. A break from study might freshen my perspective, and we should keep our strength up, in case of an unexpected attack." She tidied up her work, then stood. "Lead on."

Quarra was waiting outside. She pushed herself away from the wall and followed us without bothering to hide that she was doing it. I wondered if she just didn't care, or if her visibility was some kind of message, and if so, to what audience. Either way, I didn't suppose it mattered. If, as I suspected, it was Valen who'd ordered her to watch over me, then Quarra wasn't there to hurt me. Whether she was there to protect me or to protect other people _from_ me or just to annoy the hell out of me, now – that I wasn't so sure about.

One thing was for sure, though: if Valen's aim was to make me feel uncomfortable, he'd missed his mark. Once upon a time, I'd had so many people around me at all times that I could hardly take a piss without an audience. When I was a baby, I'd had nannies and a maid and a cook and, because I was worth a hell of a ransom, my own personal bodyguard. As I got older, my personal staff had only grown to include chaffeurs and trainers and stylists and secretaries and only the ugliest bodyguards daddy could find. So, if Valen thought he'd rattle me by pinning Quarra to my ass, he had another thing coming.

The kitchens were as busy as ever. Laele saw us come in and spared us a wave as she hurried past with a tray of some kind of little pastries. There were other trays, not long out of the oven. Nathyrra repossessed one of them and a pitcher of black wine, then sat us at an empty table in the corner, well away from everybody else. Nobody seemed to mind. Nobody aside from Laele seemed to be in a hurry to say hi to Nathyrra.

I mixed sugar and rothe milk into my not-coffee, pretending not to see the stares. "Do you always study so much?" I asked Nathyrra.

Nathyrra bit into a strange, blue-tinted sticky bun. Then she sucked a dribble of syrup off of her thumb. "Of course," she said, a little indistinctly. "It is necessary to hone my mind and body so that I might always have an edge over my opponents." She gave me a curious stare. "You said that you attended an academy. Did you not study magic?"

"Not really, no." I gave one of the blue sticky buns an experimental nibble. Then I blinked. The dough was fluffy and studded with coarse salt, which melted on my tongue in little pops of salty flavor, while the syrupy topping was thick and almost mouth-puckeringly sweet. It was a study in contrasts that made all of my taste buds ping at once. "Ungh. Wow. Laele is kind of a genius, isn't she?"

Nathyrra was smiling. "She is. I was afraid our food might not be to your taste. I am glad to be proven wrong." She pointed to a black, horn-shaped pastry with some kind of creamy filling leaking out of one end. "Here - try these. They are my favorite." She suited action to words and helped herself to one. "If I may ask, why did your studies not include magical training?"

I shrugged. "There wasn't enough time," I lied. In reality, Drogan had tried to teach me some basic theory and cantrips, but after a couple of months he'd thrown his hands up, pronounced me an anathema to all things arcane, and summarily ended those lessons. Nathyrra didn't need to know that, though. I couldn't hide the fact that I was no mage, but it was probably better to let her think my lack of training came from lack of opportunity, which I could fix if I wanted, rather than from lack of ability, which I couldn't.

The drow woman frowned. "It may be best for you to conceal that," she suggested. "Never reveal a weakness unless it is a false weakness, meant to lure your enemy into complacence. And always let them wonder what you are capable of." She nodded at my linen-clad torso. "Speaking of which, it is daring of you to be seen without armor. I approve. It shows that you are unafraid of an attack from our enemies." Then, just as my ego was starting to perk up a little, she stuck a pin in it, adding, "Or that you are stupid, but the point is that they cannot know which, and that will make them hesitate, which gives you the opportunity to strike."

My ego deflated. I was wandering around without armor because an otyugh had ripped a hole in it and Valen had insisted on getting it fixed, not because I had a diabolical plot to mess with my enemy's heads, so I was going to have to come down on the 'stupid' side of that equation. Since I wasn't _totally_ stupid, though, I wasn't going to say any of that out loud. I helped Nathyrra polish off another couple of pastries, these ones cookie-shaped with some kind of sweet-tart yellow fruit on top. "Do you ever stop thinking about how what you do looks to your enemies?" I asked.

Nathyrra blinked as if she'd never thought of that question before. "Not often, no." Her hand hovered over the tray indecisively before she selected a small cake made of layers of flaky pastry. It crunched when she bit into it. "This must be strange for you," she remarked. "The Seer tells me that things are different on the surface, but here, it is best to remain always on your guard and to consider the consequences of each action with care."

I shrugged noncommittally. It wasn't strange, exactly. It had just been a long time since I'd had to think like this. I thought I'd been done with politics, but apparently, politics wasn't done with me – and this was a far nastier and bloodier form of politics than I was used to. "So," I said then, because if I was going to get dragged into this game, I figured I'd better know the other players at the table. "Who's who around here?"

Nathyrra and I worked our way through the tray of sweets while she gave me a summary of the biggest movers and shakers of Lith My'athar, and boy, were they a scary bunch.

Mae'vir was top dog, with wily old My'rune Mae'vir at the helm. Their strength wasn't just in their size, but in their versatility, with forces that included clerics, mages, foot soldiers, lizard-riding cavalry, and even a small navy capable of navigating the Dark River. My'rune, though, was getting older and had only one surviving heir, Zessyr, who'd been thrown out of the house after trying and failing to kill her mother, because apparently if you were a drow your parents were happy to provide for you in exchange for the occasional attempt on their lives but if you screwed it up they kicked you out into the real world until you were grown-up enough to come back home and murder them _properly_. For now, My'rune held her House and the city. For how long she could retain her hold… _that_ was another matter.

House Kilanatlar came in a close second. Kilanatlar were assassins and pharmacists, keeping the city supplied with dyes, salves, poisons, and the occasional backstabbing. They also had an unusual number of drow men in unusually high positions, due to some kind of shadow magic that ran in the male line. If they had a House motto, it was probably, "Down with the matriarchy.", although they were still held in the iron fist of Matron Shyntyl Kilanatlar, because no matter how useful they were you just couldn't let that many men run around unsupervised.

Vharzyym, the druids with the garden of surface plants growing happily underground, was the Third House, led by Alulove Vharzyym and on friendly terms with Kilanatlar, in the sense that the two Houses plotted against everybody else more than they plotted against each other. They had a reputation for being long-range schemers rather than risk-takers, and Alulove as a gardener who grew her plots as patiently as she cultivated her roses.

Ischarri, on the other hand, were magical artificers and liked to take all the big risks Vharzyym wouldn't even contemplate. They were led by the ambitious, upstart Maelra Ischarri, an adoptee who'd bitten off the hand that fed her by knocking off her adopted family, taking over, and eliminating a few rival Houses to boot, effectively catapulting Ischarri to the upper echelons of Lith My'athar society in a few short years. Maelra Ischarri was going places. The only question was whether she could avoid flaming out as spectacularly as she'd risen.

Then there was Olath, the fifth House and apparently in serious danger of sliding into the lower ranks or dying out entirely, because they were a bunch of religious fanatics who'd consolidated their power in their clerics and abruptly found their power base yanked out from under them with Lolth's disappearance. They disapproved of pretty much everybody, but especially hated Kilanatlar for letting men do stuff sometimes and they really, _really_ hated Eilistraee and the Seer for suggesting that maybe they should try putting the sacrificial knives away and talking about their feelings instead.

I kept my face neutral and glanced around without moving my head. No one was sitting nearby, but I lowered my voice anyway. Elves had sharp ears. "How likely is Olath to cause trouble for the Seer?"

Nathyrra spread her hands. "That is unclear. They have little power, but that may merely make them desperate."

And desperate people took desperate measures. "Who's keeping them under control? Mae'vir?"

Nathyrra didn't sound very optimistic. "For now."

I'd seen political downfalls happen, and they tended to go one of two ways: either the person who'd been beaten crawled out of the public eye and stayed out, or they tried to stage a comeback, usually by hitching their wagon to a star. Something told me that a bunch of religious fanatics weren't going to just give up and die quietly. "Who would they ally with, if they wanted to overturn Mae'vir?"

Nathyrra frowned. "Not Kilanatlar, almost certainly. A more pragmatic House would be able to overcome their distaste for Kilanatlar's ways in order to curry their favor, but Olath are not pragmatists."

"Would they support the Valsharess?"

Nathyrra's response had the same effect on my mood that buckets of dishwater usually had on stray cats. "Any of the Houses of Lith My'athar would support the Valsharess if they felt she was the stronger ally – and if they felt that enough of the city believed as they did."

"Fan-fucking-tastic," I said, my voice glum.

Nathyrra frowned, then smiled in a delighted kind of way. "I think I understood that!" She leaned her chin on her hand. "You know, until meeting you, my knowledge of surface Common was purely academic. There were human house slaves, of course, but it would not have been appropriate to speak freely with them." She made a face. "There are many languages which I have had little opportunity to practice outside of a classroom. I hope that if we are able to defeat the Valsharess, I may go to the surface with the Seer and correct that."

I raised my eyebrows. "Really? How many languages do you speak?"

Nathyrra frowned in thought. "Let me see," she mused, and sat back, ticking languages off on her fingers. "Undercommon, surface Common, deep Gnomish, surface Gnomish, surface Elven, Duergar, Dwarven, and a smattering of Draconic and deep Imaskari. And the drow tongue, of course, but that goes without saying." She tilted her head inquiringly. "Why do you ask?"

I realized that I'd paused, my mug frozen halfway to my lips and my eyes in serious danger of plopping right into my coffee. "Just curious," I said weakly. I lowered my mug. I spoke one language. Some nice teachers had spent four years trying to teach me another one. By the end of the four years, I'd been a pro at saying 'hello', 'goodbye', and asking for directions to the bathroom. I wouldn't necessarily have _understood_ the directions once anybody gave them to me and probably would have ended up peeing in an alleyway out of desperation, but I could ask for those directions like nobody's business. "That's…really impressive."

Nathyrra smiled broadly. "Thank you," she said. She tapped her lips thoughtfully. "Since we are here, would you like to learn a little of our language?"

I didn't know how useful it was going to be – I didn't have four years to spare and I already knew where the bathroom was anyway – but it couldn't hurt, and I was at loose ends until my armor was fixed, anyway. "Sure," I said. My hand hovered over the last pastry on the tray. "Are you going to eat that?"

Nathyrra looked at the tray. Between the two of us, we'd probably devoured about a dozen pastries, a pound and a half of sugar, and I didn't want to know how many calories. "Shall we split it?" she suggested.

I grinned. "That's a brilliant idea."

Nathyrra's smile was a sudden, blinding flash. "Very well," she said, and sliced the pastry neatly in two. "There. An equitable split." Then she held up the knife. "This," she said then, her voice almost schoolteacherish, "-is called a _velve._ "

I was being taught drowish by an ex-killer-for-hire who'd traded throat-slitting for evangelism and learned obscure languages for fun. I blinked, then shrugged and refilled my mug. "Velve," I repeated.

Nathyrra shook her head. "Almost, but the final 'e' is more pronounced. Try again."

We sat at the table until the breakfast crowd had cleared, exchanging words – Nathyrra teaching me one drow word in exchange for an explanation of some surfacer term that she didn't understand. She got up once to retrieve another pitcher of not-coffee for me and a pot of tea for her, and we kept chatting until we'd drained both.

When we were done, we handed the dirty dishes and empty tray to a bemused dishwasher and strolled out. "I believe I am going to regret that meal," Nathyrra said. She put her fingers to her lips, politely stifling a burp.

I was feeling a little stuffed, myself. "Probably. But I'll deal with the regrets later."

Nathyrra smiled. "Quite - but I am glad you persuaded me to put aside my books. The pause has cleared my head, and I seldom have the chance to talk, unless it is with the Seer."

It was a loaded admission, made even more so by the way the other drow in the hall avoided her. Nathyrra wasn't the cool girl in this school, which was strange. She struck me as kind of a loner, but she seemed nice enough, as long as I could forget what she used to do for a living. I couldn't see why people would ostracize her like this. "Yeah, well, I'm game anytime you want to talk politics and eat pastries," I told her.

The drow arched an eyebrow. "Game?"

"Willing," I translated.

Her face relaxed in a smile. "Ah. Well. That is good." We got to the library. She nodded at me. "I must finish my studies, then I promised Imloth I would help him demonstrate counter-magic tactics to our forces. I will see you tomorrow?"

I smiled. "Sure," I said, and left her to her books.

I rambled on, caught somewhere between optimism and glumness. Nathyrra wasn't a friend, not yet, and I wasn't sure if she knew what a sense of humor even looked like, but she was turning out to be good company for all that. That was a nice surprise, especially compared to all the other surprises I'd had lately, but it was hard to understand why the Seer had so much faith in me when she had brilliant and formidable people like Nathyrra at her beck and call. What could I do that Nathyrra couldn't? Curse really well? Run really fast? Ruin the carpets really thoroughly?

 _If you feel that your skills are not up to par,_ Enserric's voice murmured in my head. _Then learn._

 _Learn what? I have no time to go back to school. The Valsharess is coming._

 _Then learn quickly, wielder._

 _Yeah. How?_

The sword twitched a little in my hands, as if shrugging. _Find a very good teacher._

I grimaced. He had a point. Not only was I at a disadvantage - this was _humiliating_. I thought I'd come a long way from the days when I couldn't even tell one end of a quarterstaff from the other, but these folks had me outgunned, outsmarted, and outclassed. I badly needed to step up my game, only I was damned if I knew how.

I walked the temple, mentally fixing its layout into my memory. The temple consisted of eight hallways leading from a round, central portion. _Like a spider,_ I thought, and shuddered a little. The central portion seemed to hold the actual nave, and the hallways held sleeping quarters and storerooms and other mundane things. The Seer's quarters occupied what I couldn't help but think of as the spider's head, a small circular structure off the central body.

Down at the end of the northeasternmost 'leg' of the spider, there were the sounds of fighting coming from one of the chambers. The door was open, and there was a white-robed cleric lingering just outside of it, a silvery-haired drow woman who gave me a broad smile and a nod when she saw me – one of Eilistraee's, then, because I doubted any of the locals would have been so friendly. She made no move to stop me from looking in, so I did.

Then I felt myself go still, like a hypnotist had just swung his bob in front of my eyes.

Imloth was sparring with a redheaded tornado. That was the only way to describe it.

The drow had a rapier in his right hand and a small buckler on his left wrist. He was fast, and he had a style of fighting that kept him in constant motion. That was good, because he had to be in constant motion, otherwise he would've ended up a thin smear on the floor.

Imloth bent backwards like a limbo dancer as a flail thundered towards his face, then sprang back upright and straight into a vertical leap as a foot came in to kick his legs out from under him. I saw his rapier dive like an osprey at his opponent's unarmored face.

The rapier never found its target. I saw Valen twist aside and snap his forearm up at the same time, and for a split second Imloth seemed to spin in the air with his own arm as a pivot point, his wrist caught in the tiefling's hand.

Then Valen's shoulders heaved, and the drow flew sideways. He crashed into what looked like a rack of quarterstaves, which all clattered down on top of him.

Valen paused and said something. It sounded like he was speaking drow, and it must have been something along the lines of, "Sorry for throwing you into a weapons rack," because Imloth waved his hand in a, "Don't worry about it," gesture before throwing off the fallen weaponry, getting his feet back under him, and coming back for more.

Imloth's next foray ended with him twirling away like a really martial ballerina, having taken a hit to his buckler that forced him to roll with the blow or get knocked on his ass. That left him a little too close to the wall without much room to maneuver, a problem he solved by throwing himself so hard into his spin that his feet left the ground, hit the wall for a couple of strides, then pushed him off again.

That maneuver gave the drow an opening to go after the tiefling's side, but Valen seemed to know what was up, because even as the drow was coming around the tiefling was already turning and whipping his flail up and around his body so it seemed as if he was standing, just for a moment, in a spiral of heavy black chain. The chain caught the tip of Imloth's rapier and yanked the weapon from the drow's hands just as he lunged.

The opponents backed away from each other for a moment. Valen flicked his flail, neatly dislodging the rapier and sending it straight up into the air. The rapier came back down and landed, hilt-first, in his waiting hand. He flipped it over so he was holding it by the blade and held it out to Imloth, who took it with a grin and a nod.

Then they closed again, and the next round started in a blur of motion.

I watched, frozen in awe, as the two men fought. I'd caught glimpses of Valen in a fight before, but always in the middle of a chaotic situation, and never when I was free to just stand and watch. Now, I could, and I saw that while Imloth was skilled, Valen was a damned _virtuoso_. His control over his flail was so absolute that it seemed more like an extension of his body than a weapon, and his body moved with the power of a boxer, the grace of a dancer, and the precision of a fencer, all in one.

It was impossible to look away. Valen was poetry in motion.

In my hands, Enserric jerked. _Ask him!_ the sword hissed into my head.

I blinked. Then I caught his meaning, or maybe his thought, and frowned. _You're nuts._

 _I am not. We need expert instruction. Well, here is an expert. Ask him!_

I gritted my teeth. _No._

 _Fine. I will ask him!_

My jaw started to creak. _Don't you dare._

During their next break, Imloth saw me. He lowered his weapon, shot me a wink, and jerked his chin towards me to draw Valen's attention my way.

Valen spun. His eyes widened when he saw me in the doorway, and he wobbled slightly as if on the verge of losing his balance. "My lady," he said, recovering. Hastily, he sketched a half-bow. "I apologize. I did not notice you there."

I smirked. "No problem, sunshine," I drawled, stepping through the doorway. I searched Valen's face. He looked tired. I wondered how he'd slept. Not too badly, I hoped. He was cranky enough without the sleep deprivation. "Don't feel like you have stop on my account. I was enjoying the show. Now I know why the Seer put you two in charge of her army."

Imloth grinned widely and bowed. "Thank you, priestess." His eyes danced. "I will not call you lady. I have heard of what happens to people who do that."

I managed to keep my eyebrows from lifting, and turn my surprised expression into a smile, instead. Valen had obviously been gossiping. What _else_ had he told Imloth about me? "Much obliged," I said smoothly. "Oh, by the way. Nathyrra was looking for you. She said something about counter-magic lessons."

Imloth dipped into a bow. It seemed almost instinctive. "I will go immediately."

I hadn't meant for him to run off like he'd been summoned to court. "I wouldn't rush. She's probably still in the library. She's only been in there for, oh, a day or two. Three at the outside."

Imloth laughed. "Then a good fight is exactly what she needs." He bowed to me again. "Priestess." He laid his hand on Valen's shoulder. The gesture was slow and gentle and telegraphed well before he made contact. " _Abbil_. If you require a tree, I believe the Vharzyym estate has several."

Valen's expression turned a little sullen and put-upon. "Very funny, Imloth."

The drow grinned. "I know," he said, and strutted from the room like a male model on a catwalk. I watched him go. Whoever had designed the cut of those skintight drow leathers deserved some kind of award.

The priestess of Eilistraee murmured something and left with Imloth, possibly feeling that if the sparring was over and everybody was still in one piece, her work here was done.

That left me alone with Valen.

The last time we'd spoken had been…awkward. This was awkward. Awkwardness bloomed in the silence like a corpseflower in week-old roadkill.

I cleared my throat. "A tree?" I asked.

Valen winced and ran a hand over his hair. A few coppery strands had come loose from his ponytail. Their disarray softened his face somehow, making him look a little less like a statue and a little more like a human being. "It is a long-running joke of his. The first time we met, I chased him up a tree and I, ah…" He coughed. "Threatened him. Colorfully, I am told." A blush crept up his neck. "I was…not entirely in my right mind."

A dozen smart-aleck comments rose to my tongue. Then I put 'not entirely in my right mind' together with what he had told me last night, and suddenly, the edge that had been forming on my tongue softened. "Oh."

The blush was deepening. "Drow humor being what it is, and Imloth being Imloth, he thought it was funny."

In spite of myself, I smiled. I had to put my hand over my mouth to hide it. If the man's face got much redder, it was going to match his hair. "And now Imloth teases you about it?"

Valen's scowl turned glum. "Constantly. Especially after someone translated the more difficult words for him." He shot me a reproachful look, his blush now up to his cheekbones. "And now _you_ are laughing."

"Sorry." I looked down at the floor and bit my lip. A little hiccup of laughter escaped me. I scuffed the toe of my boot over a crack in the stone floor. "Um. Imloth seems to have a lively sense of humor."

"Yes," Valen replied drily. "In the same sense that a horde of manes is lively – especially when they all explode simultaneously." He looked at my face. That odd expression came back. "Do you…know what a mane is?"

It was my turn to blush. "Um. I'm assuming you're not talking about the one on the horse."

Valen stared at me. His hand came up abruptly, open-palmed, as if he was about to smack his forehead, but at the last minute he changed the motion so he just ended up running his palm over his face instead. "How have you survived this long?" he said into his hand, his voice wondering.

I grinned sheepishly and shrugged. "Dumb luck and pure pigheadedness, mostly."

He stared at me a few moments longer. Then he looked down, pinching the bridge of his nose, though not before a smile flickered across his face. "I see."

I stared at him. "You're laughing at me!" I exclaimed incredulously. "You're laughing at me because I didn't know what a mane was!"

The tiefling kept his eyes on the floor, but I could still see his lips twitch. "Perhaps a little." Then he scrubbed his hand over his face, cleared his throat, took, a breath, and looked up. His expression was almost back to its normal sternness. "I apologize, my la-"

I held up a warning finger. "Ah?"

Valen paused, then bowed his head contritely. "I apologize, Windwalker," he said. "It is not fair to expect you to know these things. Sometimes I forget that I am no longer in the Planes. It is…strange to be among people who have lived all their lives on one world. That is all."

I chewed on the inside of my cheek and stared at nothing in particular. "Uh-huh," I mumbled. I felt a twitch. My free hand slapped Enserric's blade. "Shut up, you."

Valen gave me the kind of look usually reserved for the guy sitting next to you on the park bench who was having an animated conversation with the lamp post. "The sword did not say anything."

I sighed. "He was about to," I said, and looked down, suddenly reminded of Enserric's earlier advice. The sword was right – annoying, but right. Was I a spoiled brat with delusions of heroism, or was I an adventurer worth the gift Shaundakul, in an apparent fit of divine lunacy, had given me? If I was the latter, then I needed to act the part. Halaster might have taken the sky away from me, for now, but he'd accidentally given me another powerful resource in the process - Enserric. I had to learn use that resource, but had no idea how, which meant I needed help from someone who knew how to fight _and_ how to keep a secret. Of all the people here, I thought the person who most fit that description was the one I had standing right in front of me. I looked around and lowered my voice. "Is it safe to talk here? Without being overheard?"

The tiefling blinked and stood up a little straighter. "Not very," he said. He gave me a look that made me feel weighed and measured. "The temple library is the most secure. That or the Seer's quarter's."

I nodded. "Let's go to the library," I said curtly, which were five words I'd never expected to hear myself say in this lifetime.

Thankfully, Imloth must have dragged Nathyrra away from her books, because the library was empty – or so it appeared, anyway. I stalked to the center of the room. "Enserric. Is there anyone else in here?"

The sword flared. "No, wielder. Not that I can sense."

"Good." Then I turned to face Valen, drew in a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and started to talk.

I told him about Silent Partner, the weapon I'd carried until the Valsharess stole it out from under my nose, though I didn't tell him about Harry. That was way more than he needed to know. I told him about the attack on the Yawning Portal, the desperate rush into Undermountain, about picking up and using Enserric when my other staff broke.

Finally, I told him about how Enserric and I were connected, about Enserric's experiments, the wooziness if we were separated, and Enserric's hypothesis about what would happen if we were taken too far apart, though I didn't tell him about that weird synergy Enserric and I had fallen into in Talona's temple. I didn't even want to _think_ about that, much less talk about it.

Valen listened silently through the entire explanation, his eyes on my face. When I was done, he was silent long enough that I started to measure the distance between me and the door. "I am sorry about your old staff," he said at last. He wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his flail. "A warrior's weapon, carried long enough, becomes as much a part of her as her own right hand. The Valsharess dealt you a grave injury when she took it from you."

I looked away and tightened my jaw against the upwelling lump in my throat. My voice cracked anyway. "Thank you."

Silence fell – almost. A faint, metallic tapping noise echoed through the library. It took me several moments to figure out that it was the tip of Valen's tail, tapping thoughtfully against his armored shin. "I can see why you did not tell me this earlier, and why you wished for secrecy," he said. "You are bound to a weapon you do not know how to use. This knowledge cannot be allowed to fall into our enemy's hands. If it does, we may have a problem."

I gaped at him. "We _may_ have a problem?" I wheezed. "What would you consider a definite problem, then? The apocalypse?"

He frowned briefly, then shrugged. "I can think of any number of things."

"I'm sure you can." And each one would probably be even more horrible than the last. The Abyss must have warped his definition of 'bad' something fierce. "Excuse me," I added. I groped behind me for a chair. "I have to sit down."

Valen nodded absently, his stern face lost in thought. "We may have an advantage, now that I think of it," he mused.

I blinked at him. "Which is?"

"You need not become an expert swordswoman." The tiefling shrugged. "Merely a competent one, so that you can hold your own if your spells are not enough to keep you out of a close fight."

So he thought I wasn't even competent, did he? My shoulders sagged. "Do you think you can do it?" I asked, without much hope. "Make me good enough to stay alive, I mean."

Valen frowned pensively. "With the time you have bought us by denying the Valsharess access to the Undermountain? Perhaps. It will not be easy, but, if you are willing to work with me, perhaps we can accomplish something." His eyes met mine, a faint and troubled line appearing between his brows. "I told you what I am," he added suddenly. "What I was. And yet, you have chosen to trust me with this. Why?"

I hesitated. Then I shrugged and told the truth. "I don't know much about tieflings, but you seem like a decent person," I admitted. "And you know how to fight. I thought maybe you could help."

Valen stared at me. He seemed to have stopped breathing or blinking. "You are not smiling."

I gave him a confused look. "Sorry. Should I be?"

He drew in a sudden breath and shook his head, pulling his eyes away from mine. "No," he said. "You should not." He looked back up at me. Some indefinable tension had left his face, softening it into a smile that barely touched his lips but left a sunlight sparkle in his bright blue eyes. "Thank you."

I blinked at him and wondered if you got earthquakes in the Underdark. I felt wobbly and off-balance, as if the world had just shifted under my feet, only I couldn't put my finger on why. "F-for what?"

"For trusting a tiefling." Valen leapt to his feet. "Come," he added with a sudden, brisk tone in his voice, and he held his hand out to me. "Our time is limited. If we are to do this, we should use every moment available to us."

I stood uncertainly and placed my hand in his, wondering who this nice man was and what he'd done to Valen and where he'd hidden the corpse. "Um. Okay. Where are we going?" I asked, allowing myself to be pulled towards the door.

"Back to the practice room," Valen answered. He looked over his shoulder at me, raising one thin red eyebrow. "You asked for my help, did you not?"

I trailed after him, limp and unresisting, my mouth half-open in shock. "Oh." My voice was weak. A memory of Drogan's practice barn reared its ugly head. "I'm gonna have a lot of bruises by this time tomorrow, aren't I?"

Valen frowned. "Perhaps. I will try not to hurt you, but neither will I coddle you. Too much is at stake."

I winced and let him haul me down the hallway. "Well, at least you're honest."

* * *

I made it back to my bedroom several hours later.

It took me a few tries to turn the doorknob. My arms felt like they were made of lead, my legs of marshmallow fluff. I hoped no one was looking, or if they were, they just assumed I was drunk.

I finally managed to get the door open and stagger into my room. I fell against the inside of the door to close it, then dropped Enserric. I couldn't hold him up anymore.

The sword knocked a chip out of the marble floor when it fell. The spirit in the sword seemed far too glum to notice, or care. "Well, that was a humbling experience."

I barely had the energy to muster a snarled, "No comment." I made for the bathroom, hoping I still had enough strength left in my legs to make it into the bathtub without collapsing and cracking my skull on the tiles. I'd sweated more in these past few hours than over the month preceding, and that was including the tenday-long run from the wayshrine to Waterdeep.

Something caught my eye, and I managed to sway to a stop.

There was a bouquet of long-stemmed roses sitting on the side table. They were yellow, with dark green leaves.

I blinked. "Roses," I said flatly. "In the Underdark." I turned to the table, my movements slow, and not only due to weariness. Those roses had definitely not been here when I left. Alarm rang through me – and I, fool that I was, had just dropped my only weapon. "Enserric. Are we alone?"

The sword pulsed for a moment. "I believe so."

I relaxed – slightly – and stepped closer to the table. The fragrance of roses filled my head. There were a dozen of them, arranged with artful simplicity in a black stone vase.

I didn't touch them. Memories of other bouquets, received from boyfriends and would-be boyfriends in a life that wasn't mine anymore, trickled back into my head. "What do yellow roses mean?" I murmured. I couldn't remember.

"It depends on whom you ask," Enserric answered. "In some traditions, they signify friendship."

There was no note. Only flowers. "In others?"

The sword paused for a moment before answering. "Deceit."

There was something nestled in the petals of the longest stem. I pulled my knife from my belt and poked at the whatever-it-was with the tip.

A golden filigree ball fell to the ground, and with a click, it unfolded into a flat, starlike shape. An image appeared in the air above it.

I stumbled backwards. "What the-" Then I stopped.

The image was a map.

It was a map, the same kind of three-dimensional scale model of the Underdark that the Seer kept in the library. As I watched, the illusionary map began to turn. I saw Lith My'athar, with a pinpoint of purple light shining at the temple. Then the purple light began to move. It traced a path from the temple, to the gates of Lith My'athar, and then out and up, through caverns and tunnels to the one part of the map that was bright and green. When I saw it, a sharp throbbing began at the base of my skull.

The little purple light reached the end of the trail, and paused at the trail's end on the surface. Then the illusion reset itself, turning back to its starting point in the temple of Lolth in the heart of Lith My'athar and retracing the entire path again.

I watched the whole thing replay. "What the hell," I breathed. "Somebody just showed me a way to the surf-" Pain stabbed through my head, and I doubled forward, groaning and clutching the back of my skull as if it was about to fall off. I gritted my teeth and tried again. "Surface," I panted. "It's a map. To the surface."

A slow and thoughtful ripple of red ran up and down Enserric's blade. "How bizarre. Who would have given it to you?"

I stared at the roses, a vase full of sunny impossibility, deep underground. "House Vharzyym."


	29. Rags to Riches

_A/N: Going to be gone for a couple of weeks, so y'all get a twofer this week. More stage-setting and chit-chat, plus a dose of reality for Rebecca, and then off to the races again..._

* * *

 _This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one's own life._

\- D. H. Lawrence _, The Rainbow_

~*~  
Chapter 29: Rags to Riches  
~*~

My eyes popped open. I bit back a banshee scream.

The marshmallow-fluff-and-lead feeling from last night had undergone a remarkable metamorphosis. Now it felt like someone had turned my muscles into rubber, left them out in the desert sun to dry until they were stiff and cracked, then poured hot lead into the cracks.

I tried to roll over. Muscles I hadn't even known existed made themselves known by rioting, which as far as I was concerned was a really rude way to introduce yourself.

I fell back, panting. "Okay." I huffed a few deep, short breaths to psych myself up. "All right. I can do this." I tried to move my leg. Pain flared, practically blinding me. _All right. So maybe I can't do this._

Next, I tried just moving my fingers. That worked. _Hallelujah._ _So, if I can just figure out how to kill the Valsharess with my pinkie finger, we're all set_. Of course, if I did that, it would have to be without the benefit of my arms. I couldn't even lift them, and my right shoulder was killing me. I couldn't remember exactly how that had happened, but I thought it had been when I'd tried to kick Valen in the back of the knee. He'd responded by spinning around before I'd even finished moving, grabbing me by the still-upraised leg, and throwing me. It had all gone by so quickly that I hadn't even been able to figure out what was happening until I hit the ground. With my shoulder. And the rest of me, too, but my shoulder had hit first and hardest.

My back didn't even bear contemplating. That was probably due to the quarterstaff rack. Somebody really had to move that thing. That, or somebody had to tell that man that he wasn't supposed to keep _throwing people into it._

Inch by painful inch, I scuttled towards the edge of the bed, pausing frequently to catch my breath and wait for my muscles to stop screaming. After about a quarter of an hour, I finally got close enough to risk trying to lower my legs over the side.

I had been expecting the pain. I had even been expecting the spasm that made my body heave like a freshly-hooked carp. What I hadn't counted on and really should have taken into consideration were the sheets, which were silk and, while very comfortable, also very slippery.

I slithered off of the bed with a scream and a waterfall of silk, which sounded luxuriant but really wasn't.

When the spots cleared from my eyes, I found myself flat on the floor, half-buried in a pile of bedsheets. "Mommy," I whimpered.

Enserric's voice drifted across the room. "That was quite an engrossing spectacle. Are you planning on a repeat performance? If so, we may wish to hang a sign outside the door and charge admission."

I found my voice somewhere. "Thanks for your concern." Another spasm went through me. "Asshole."

The sword was unmoved. "You were worried about our lack of coin. I am merely offering a solution."

I stared at the ceiling. "Enserric?"

"Yes?"

"Your solutions suck."

"Hmph! Fine. Lie there and rot for all I care," Enserric said, putting on a tone of lofty indifference which almost immediately devolved into quivering indignation. "Really, must you be so…so…"

"So what?"

"So _obdurate_."

"Dude, I don't even know what that word _means_."

"I know!" my sword cried in a voice that made it clear that if he still had hands, he would have thrown them in the air. "That is the worst indignity of them all! I am inextricably bound to a _moron_!"

I jerked in irritation, which made another surge of pain run through me, which made my next words come out as a roar. "You think _you've_ got it bad? I'm inex…whateverly bound to a _nerd_!" A knock on the door interrupted us both and made me cringe. This was bad enough without having witnesses – witnesses other than Enserric, anyway. "Who is it?" I hollered.

A familiar voice floated through the door, muffled by a few layers of mushroom fiber. "It is Nathyrra. Are you well? I was just coming to ask you to join us when I heard shouting."

The question, 'Do I trust her enough to let her in here right now?' was asked and answered in the time it took me to calculate my odds of making it to my feet without help. "Good," I yelled back. "Come in and close the door behind you. Fast."

The door opened. Nathyrra slipped in. Her eyes widened when she saw me, and she shut the door and crossed over to me swiftly, kneeling by my side. "What happened?" she gasped.

At least there was a silver lining to this – I'd been able to flap the unflappable Nathyrra. "I asked Valen to show me how to fight."

The alarm fled the drow's face. Her lips twitched upwards. "Oh. I see."

The silver lining was tarnishing rapidly. "Yeah. And now I can't move." I rocked on my back like an overturned turtle. "Could you please help me up?"

Nathyrra bit her lip, obviously biting back a smile. "Of course," she said, and slipped an arm under my shoulders. It took the two of us to get me to my feet, and there were a couple of exciting moments when I almost lost my balance and took us both down, but eventually I was upright. I was also naked, but that was the least of my problems. "Thanks," I said breathlessly. "Now, could you please help me to the bathroom, fill the tub with hot water, and help me into it….oh, and could you please slit my throat for me? Thanks in advance."

Nathyrra smiled briefly. "I can fulfill all but your last request. But if I may make a suggestion-"

I grunted as my feet hit the cold marble of the bathroom floor. Against all probability, the soles of my feet hurt. "What's that?"

"It may be wise to send for the Seer. She can heal you. To be in such pain may needlessly compromise your ability to defend yourself."

I shook my head sharply, then winced. "No. I don't want word to get out about this." I was in the shark tank here. The last thing I needed was for the sharks to scent blood in the water. "Just…help me into the tub. Please. I'll be fine after a hot bath." _I hope._

Nathyrra raised her eyebrows. "As you wish." She eased me down into the tub, then opened the taps. The saving grace of this place was the fact that the priestesses of Lolth had apparently enjoyed their creature comforts, so their quarters contained enormous sunken tubs and some form of magical indoor plumbing. I didn't understand the mechanics and, as long as hot water came out of the tap, not spiders or poison, I didn't even care. "Your concerns are not unreasonable, I think," Nathyrra went on, testing the water with her hand in an oddly motherly way. "If it is known how badly the _qu'el'saruk_ was able to beat you, they will know you are not his equal in combat." A proud smile curved her lips. "Very few are. However, as I have mentioned before, among the drow it is best to cultivate a certain air of mystery."

I wondered who'd cultivated the mystery of those roses. Vharzyym, probably, since they were the gardeners around here, but who'd snuck them in under the noses of the Seer's guards, and who'd made that map? "What did you call him?" I asked absently. "Quel-something?"

" _Qu'el'saruk_. Weapon master."

I let my head sink back agains the rim of the tub, sighing as hot water began to creep up my aching flanks. "Good name for him."

Nathyrra smiled. "Quite." She crouched back on her haunches, leaned a delicate chin on a delicate hand, and studied my body with frank curiosity. "Do humans normally turn so many colors when they are wounded?"

I looked down at myself. I _did_ look like I'd run afoul of a painter's palette, albeit a painter who'd been partial to purples and greens. "Only when they get the shit kicked out of them by quelsaruks."

Nathyrra pursed her lips. "Close," she said, in a patient tone. "But you must glide more over the word, and keep your vowels more open, and you must do something about your 'R's'. They are very harsh." She looked at me again, still with that unabashed curiosity. "Why is some of your skin a different color from the rest?"

I held my hand up, inspecting it. Water dripped from my fingers. "It's tanned."

The drow blinked. " _Tanned_?"

It dawned on me that someone who'd never seen the sun had probably never heard of tanning, either. "Oh, um." I hunted for a simple explanation. "If you spend a lot of time in the sunlight, it can make your skin darker." I twisted a little to look at her. "Well, maybe not your skin."

Nathyrra blinked again. "How peculiar." She shook her head. "I think I must see your surface world to believe it. I have heard stories of things like the sun and sky and moonlight, but I cannot imagine how such things can possibly be real. They all seem so…wildly improbable."

I laughed. "Funny. That's how I feel about the Underdark."

Nathyrra tilted her head. "I suppose that is only natural," she conceded. "But you need not fear. By Eilistraee's grace, I will not be alone when I go to the surface to see her light with my own eyes, and you are not alone here." She stood and went to the clothes stand, fingering my discarded clothes from yesterday. "Is this all you have?"

I sighed. _Again with the wardrobe criticism_. "Yeah. The Valsharess sent a Red Sister after me when I was still on the surface, and she stole all of my things before trying to kill me."

Nathyrra nodded. "Yes. That is a common tactic of the Red Sisters. It is as much about killing your victim's hope as it is about killing your victim." She looked over her shoulder at me. "I am impressed that you survived."

I shrugged. I hadn't really done anything impressive. I'd just stumbled into the right combination of dumb luck and divine intervention. But hey, she'd said I should cultivate an air of mystery, so I acted blasé and changed the subject. "You seem familiar with the Red Sisters. Have you fought them before?"

Without looking at me, Nathyrra ran her fingertips along the top rung of the clothes rack, as if checking for dust. It took so long for her to answer that I almost thought she hadn't heard me. "Yes," she said. "The Valsharess was the one who destroyed my House. Luckily, I had allies who were able to warn me and to help me escape. The Valsharess obviously could not let the daughter of a rival House live to oppose her, so she sent her Red Sisters to hunt me down."

I closed my eyes briefly. First Valen, now this. Was there anyone around here who _hadn't_ suffered so much trauma in their lives it made mine look like a frolic through a springtime meadow? "Since you're still alive, I'm going to assume that those Red Sisters aren't."

Nathyrra turned. Her smile flashed like a knife. "Yes. One by one, they chased me down and tried to eliminate me. One by one, I eliminated them." Then her brow creased and her fire faded, and she looked down, touching my tatty clothes. "This will not do," she said suddenly, in a soft voice that held dismay and something else I couldn't quite figure out. "You should not go about the city attired like this. You are our ally now. You must look the part." Her voice faltered. "I…I am sorry. The Red Sisters did you more harm than I knew. I must…I must make amends for this." She cleared her throat and moved towards the door. "I will try to find you something else. I will return shortly."

I watched her go, then let my head fall back again. Steam was rising up around me, and my abused muscles were finally unclenching. It improved my mood to the point that I was almost able to resign myself to a wardrobe makeover. Enserric was right. Nathyrra was right. Everybody was right, damn them all, and the realization was enough to make me want to spit: I couldn't go on as I had been.

The last years had been such a reprieve. I'd spent most of my life and obscene amounts of money maintaining a certain image. I hadn't done it because I wanted to, but because it was expected of me. Granddaddy Blumenthal had started a banking empire, and daddy had used that fortune to build a real estate empire on top of it. As the sole heiress to it all, I'd been a public figure since the day I was born, and that meant I had to look the part, whether I liked it or not. I hadn't. I'd hated it, and I'd eventually collapsed under the weight of all those expectations.

Then my life had changed and I'd become a plain old nobody, and it had been wonderful - until now. One trip through the streets of Lith My'athar and a few days among the drow had shown me that the drow didn't do plain and had no respect for nobodies. I didn't know how much any human would impress them – I got the impression the drow didn't think too highly of each other, much less anyone who wasn't drow - but I wasn't making things any better for myself by looking like a slob, and I couldn't afford to make them worse.

I was up to the chin in sudsy water when Nathyrra came back. She was carrying an armload of fabric. "You are very tall, which makes things difficult," she announced. "Luckily, Laele and Quarra are close to your height, and they had a few things they no longer wished to keep. It will not be ideal, I am afraid, but it will be better than what you have now." She placed the pile of clothes carefully on what looked like a makeup table, then turned to me. "Would you like some help?"

I put my forearms on the sides of the tub and tried to lever myself up. Water sloshed as I sat back down heavily. "Oh," I said meditatively. "Only all I can get."

Nathyrra chuckled, and with her help, I managed to climb out of the tub, dry myself off, and start sorting through the pile of clothes.

The drow woman took a surprisingly girlish delight in selecting garments. She also had exquisite taste and had apparently decided that her duty to the Seer included appointing herself as my personal stylist. Drow fashion seemed to put heavy emphasis on rich jewel tones, opulent fabrics, and form-fitting cuts that were made for ease of movement as much as for show. I wasn't looking for showy, but we finally settled on a set of spider's silk garments that were practical enough for my tastes and stylish enough for Nathyrra's. A deep turquoise tunic hung heavy in my hands, embellished with black lacework like spiderwebs around the collar and cuffs. A fitted crimson shirt with a high, stiff neck and a narrow, plunging neckline did a decent job of hinting at the presence of cleavage without showing enough to reveal the truth, which was that I didn't actually have any. A flowing blouse in deep amber had a shimmer that made it look almost like gold and an elegant drape that seemed more suited to a cocktail party than a fight, but Nathyrra assured me the fabric would hold up to anything. Quarra's old black rothé hide leggings were a little too snug around the hips and a couple of inches too short, but my boots were high enough to hide the one sin and hopefully the other sin would go away as my decidedly non-drowish derriere stretched the leather with wear.

I pulled the amber blouse over my head, and emerged from a swathe of fabric to see Nathyrra smiling in self-satisfied sort of way. "I chose well," she said. "That is a good color for you." She eyed me, a strange new respect entering her tone. "The Seer was right. You _do_ have the bearing of a noble female. It was only...difficult to see, before."

I felt a sobering tug of melancholy. Tomi had said much the same thing. So had Mags, the first time we met. She'd said I held my head like I had a crown on it. "You're not the first person to say that."

Nathyrra smiled. "I am not surprised." Her white eyebrow arched as she looked me up and down. "Now you almost look like a fitting adversary for a Matron Mother."

I glanced in the mirror and straightened to my full height, twitching the folds of my blouse so that it fell properly. Even as I did so, my mouth quirked in a derisive smirk. _Fine feathers, that's all they are. It doesn't mean anything._ But still… "Thank you, Nathyrra," I said, and even my voice had changed a little, shifting from the streets to the penthouse. Maybe the woman I'd once been wasn't entirely gone, and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Some grubby hobo was no match for a queen. The Blumenthal princess, now… I snuck another glance in the mirror and smirked. _Shame that bitch stole my tiara._

Combing my fingers through my still-damp hair, I strode to the side table, where my belt lay. The vase and flowers were in the closet, where I'd stashed them the night before. My hand hovered over the belt and its many pouches, hesitating.

 _Do I, or don't I?_

On the one hand, here was a chance to get away from all this and see blue skies again, but that came with a pain in my head that might just pop my skull in a year or so, not to mention the guilt of abandoning people who were, against all reason, counting on me.

On the other hand, there was a chance I was going to die horribly if I stayed here, but there was also a chance I could help stop a war. _And just think of the bragging rights._ Baz would lose his shit when he found out that I'd made it to the Underdark before _he_ had, and wouldn't Kelavir be impressed if his protégé managed to raise a shrine to Shaundakul so far below the ground? I'd have to find a good place for it, of course, and since I didn't know much about stone-shaping it probably wouldn't look very impressive, but I was willing to bet it would be the first of its kind.

Places in the world where the wind couldn't reach? Hah! There was no such thing. There were only places where the wind hadn't reached _yet_.

I picked up the belt, turned, and spoke to Nathyrra. "Where's Valen?" I asked, buckling the belt low on my hips. There was always a chance I would die horribly, whether I stayed here or not, but if I left, I'd miss all kinds of fun things – like the look on Valen's face when I showed him what had turned up on my doorstep last night. If he still didn't trust me after this, I was going to make him _eat_ those roses, thorns and all.

Nathyrra tilted her head. "In the library, with the Seer. She was able to divine some of the Valsharess's movements. I was to take you to them, before…well, before all this." Her eyebrows raised. "Is it urgent?"

 _Right._ The Seer probably needed to know about this, too. I touched the pouch where the little golden ball lay. "Let's say I'd rather not let it wait too long."

The drow woman nodded, and at once she shed the girly-girl persona and slipped back into cool professionalism. "Let us go." Her smile was a quick flash of very white teeth against very black skin. "I will bring Laele's sweetstuffs there."

Whatever else she was, she was a woman after my own heart where sugar was concerned. "Bring lots. This could take a while."

Nathyrra laughed and left. I took out my little fluorspar stone, looked at it, then brought it to my lips and kissed it. _Sorry, everybody._ _I'll see you when I can. Keep folks safe up there._

Across the hall, Deekin's door was closed. I rapped on it, rapid-fire. "Deeks," I called. "You awake?"

Inside, something banged. Something metallic hit the floor, first with a crash and then with an increasingly fast _wong-wong-wong_ sound before it finally went still. I heard what sounded like a curse, then fast, light footsteps, increasing in volume as they came closer to the door.

The door opened. Deekin's snout poked out. "Oh, hey, Boss!" he chirped. "What's shakin'?"

I frowned. "You really need to stop talking like me, Deeks. You know how it confuses people."

"Yeah." The kobold grinned slyly, his forked tongue poking out sideways between his pointy little teeth. "And it be ever so much fun."

I stared at him. Then I threw my head back and laughed, a belly laugh of pure delight. "You're a devious little shit. You do know that, don't you?"

He giggled. "Deekin knows it."

I shook my head, smiling. "Well, if you're not too busy doing whatever it was you were doing in there, come on." I glanced up and down the hall. It looked like we were alone, but that didn't necessarily mean much. "I've got some news you won't want to miss."

The kobold's eyes brightened. "All right!" he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together with glee. "Now we be cooking with charcoal. Deekin be right with you, Boss." He looked over his shoulder. "Just gotta, uh, clean up a few things."

In the library, a familiar red-haired figure was standing at the map table, as was the Seer. They both looked up as we entered, the Seer with a welcoming smile and Valen with a startled blink. Maybe he hadn't expected to see me upright so soon after he'd mistaken me for a mop and wiped the floor with me, or maybe he was just used to seeing me dressed like I lived in a refrigerator carton. Either way, it was sort of nice to see that I could surprise the man who didn't even bat an eye at giant demonic vultures.

A voice lilted over the library's hush. "By Eilistraee's grace!" it exclaimed. Imloth was lounging on one of the sofas in a way that seemed calculated to show his figure to its best advantage, although he did it so carelessly that it came off as habit more than anything else. He had long-stemmed goblet loosely cupped in his fingers and an amused smile on his face. "I almost did not know you, priestess," he laughed. "What prompted this change of attire?"

I shrugged. "Nathyrra decided I needed a new wardrobe." I looked down at myself and flicked an imaginary speck of lint from my sleeve. "Do you like it?"

Imloth raised his eyebrows, then lifted his free hand and made a 'turn-around' motion with his forefinger. "Let me see, let me see," he urged. I held my arms out and completed a full circle, meeting the drow's broad grin at the end of it. "Oh, sweet Eilistraee, yes. Much better," he assured me. He raised his glass in salute and gave me a smile that, in the instant it crossed his face, had probably seriously startled women all across Lith My'athar by making their panties spontaneously catch fire for no readily identifiable reason. "You almost look civilized now."

I let my arms fall and concealed a wince at a twinge from my shoulder. "Thank you. I think."

The Seer studied me in concern. "Are you well, Rebecca? You move as if you are in pain."

I obviously hadn't been hiding it as well as I'd hoped. I crossed to the table, trying not to limp. "Oh, I'm fine. I asked Valen to help me practice my swordplay, but he must have heard me say I wanted to learn how to fly, because he spent most of the afternoon throwing me across the room. Honest mistake. Anyone could've made it."

Imloth's musical laughter rang across the room. "O-ho. So you sparred with our General, did you?"

"Either that or another city fell on me," I quipped. "Nathyrra had to help me get out of bed this morning." I paused. "Wait. That didn't come out right."

Imloth laughed merrily. "Oh, no," he demurred. "That sounds _entirely_ right."

A smoky rasp cut across the room. It did not sound pleased. "Imloth. Enough. This is not the time for such games."

The master-at-arms tilted his head as if in surprise, then shrugged. "Very well," he sighed. He took a sip of whatever was in his glass. It was purple and looked like wine, although if so, he was getting an awfully early start, even by my standards. "You do not play enough, _abbil_. It is not good for you. You should laugh more. Relax. Enjoy yourself." He waved his glass in the air. "Life is too short to also be dull."

Valen snorted. When I looked at him, his eyes were glued to the map, and his face was tense and red-cheeked. "I will relax when I am dead." His eyes flicked up at me, briefly. "Windwalker." He looked down, his voice going stiff. "I apologize for causing you pain. That was not my intent." A frown creased his lips. "Why did you not say anything? I would have been more careful, had I known."

I shrugged one shoulder, or tried to. "You did exactly what I asked you to. Why should I say anything?" Also, while it was painfully obvious that I was no match for the weapon master in a fight, I'd be damned if I let the man who'd been through literal Hell believe I wasn't tough enough to handle a little drubbing in the practice room. "Besides, it's not really that bad. I've gotten worse falling off a horse." I paused, wincing in remembrance. "And a camel. And out of a tree. Sorry. _Trees_. And – oh, yeah. There was that time I fell off a balcony, although there was a pool underneath it so that wasn't so bad. And there was that time I fell off a mountain..." I trailed off in sudden dismay. Maybe Deekin was right. Maybe I _did_ have a thing for danger, or at least for getting myself into situations where I was likely to get hurt. I'd certainly, in retrospect, ended up in a whole lot more of them than any sane person should have. "Uh. Anyway, long story short, I've done worse."

Valen's frown deepened. "Perhaps, but-"

"Peace, Valen," the Seer's musical voice interjected. She came towards me, a warm smile on her lips. "May I?" she asked, holding out her hands to either side of my head. Hesitantly, I nodded, and she touched her fingertips lightly to my temples. I saw her lips move as she whispered something in the drow language, and I felt a cool tingle run through me. "There," she said, and let her hands fall. "That should help."

I tried to move my arms and blinked. "Oh," I said, and couldn't quite keep the relief from my voice. "Oh, that's better. Thank you."

The Seer nodded and turned. "There. Do you see?" she told Valen gently. She crossed to him and laid a hand on his arm. "No lasting harm done. She is well."

The tiefling nodded tersely. "Good," he said, and leaned over the map. He didn't spare me another glance. "Where is Nathyrra? We have news of the Valsharess's forces. Nathyrra was supposed to bring you here."

"Here," the ex-assassin's voice answered. She entered the room, balancing a tray of food on one hand. I recognized some of the pastries, and the carafe of steaming black liquid. She set it all down on a nearby table. "Laele sends her regards," she told me. "She says that she has seldom found such an appreciative audience for her baking."

I leaned Enserric against the table and picked up a sticky bun, grinning. "Thank you, Nathyrra. You're a peach, and so's Laele." I turned back to the table. "Now that we're all here, there's something I'd like to show you."

The Seer smiled at me with sort of amused curiousity. "Very well. What is it, Windwalker?"

I dug the little golden ball out of my pouch. "This," I said, and knelt to set the ball carefully on the floor. Then I stood back and took a bite of sticky bun as I watched the show.

The ball unfolded, just like last time, and projected its little map into the air.

Everyone gathered around the magical ball – the Seer twitching her dress out of the way and stepping closer, intrigued, Valen moving swiftly around the table to stand and glare at the map like he could scare it off, Imloth rising from the sofa and drifting in languidly, and Nathyrra crouching by the little illusion, her face fascinated.

Deekin gasped and crept closer. "Wow!" he said. He stretched his head out on his neck, peering closely at the spinning image. "Cool! What be that?"

I gestured with my pastry. "Looks like directions to the surf-" Pain hit me, making my face squinch up. "-fuck." I took a breath and tried again. "The s-" More pain. I gritted my teeth and looked up at the ceiling, breathing deeply through my nose. "Okay," I said to the ceiling. "This is starting to piss me off." I looked down, took a couple of bracing breaths, then blurted the words out in a rush. "Directionstothesurface." That only hurt a little. I relaxed. "There."

The Seer looked at me, the corners of her almond-shaped eyes tightening as if in sympathy. "The geas?" she asked. When I nodded, she sighed. "I see."

Valen sucked in a sharp breath. "Where did you get that?"

I looked at Valen. His baby blues had gone gratifyingly wide. I smirked a little. "It was waiting for me when I got back to my room last night, together with a very pretty bouquet of roses."

Valen jerked in alarm. His eyes went red. Then, all at once, he strode to the door, yanking it open and delivering a stream of words to the guard outside. I didn't understand any of it, but it didn't sound happy, and after a couple of exchanges one of the guards took off down the hall as if he'd been shot from a trebuchet – which, given the look on Valen's face, was an option the tiefling was willing to entertain.

Imloth's eyebrows were almost at his hairline. "Roses?" he wondered. "Why roses?"

A slight widening of Nathyrra's eyes betrayed her surprise. "Vharzyym," she breathed.

I went to pour myself a mug of black wine. "That was what I thought. But how'd they get past the guards?"

Valen shut the door with a little more force than was strictly necessary and stalked back. "I would like to know that, as well," he said darkly. His eyes still had a little red in them, his tail was lashing like a tiger's, and his fingers were flexing like he wanted to strangle someone. He seemed to be taking the failure of his security measures as a personal insult. "Seer," he said abruptly. "With your permission, I would like to-"

The Seer raised a hand, forestalling him. "I know. And I hear you, my dear Valen. Do not think that I dismiss your concerns or that I do not value your counsel." Her midnight blue eyes went steely. "But I will not hide behind these walls and keep my own people at bay." She held her hands out, pleading for him to understand. "They do evil, Valen, but they are not beyond redemption. They are sick. Lolth is their affliction, and Eilistraee is their cure – all the more so now that the Spider Queen's voice has gone silent. If there is a chance, however remote, that by leaving these doors open to the people of Lith My'athar, I can save even one soul from Lolth's grasp, I will take it."

Valen took a few deep, seething breaths. "If the Valsharess wins, no one will be saved."

The Seer smiled at him gently. "I have faith that this will not come to pass."

The tiefling stared at his Seer helplessly, frustration painted on his face and visible in the lashing of his tail. "Seer…"

Things were getting a little tense. "I have a solution," I said brightly.

Valen's head swung my way, and not in a friendly way. His voice took on a razor's edge. "Which _is_?"

"We could all start sleeping on the roof." I took a sip of not-coffee. "Hell, it's not like we'd have to worry about getting rained on."

Valen blinked. Then one corner of his mouth crooked upwards slightly. "It would not help us very much," he said. Blue bled back into his irises. "Drow are excellent climbers. Besides, there is another possibility you have not considered."

And just like that, he was calm again. This man's moods were going to give me whiplash. "Which is?"

"Bats."

"Oh." I grinned suddenly. "So you're saying we won't have to worry about rain, but we might have to worry about a short, sharp shower of sh-"

Valen coughed. "Yes," he interrupted, his voice a little strained. "If not in so many words."

"Don't worry. If it's words you want, I've got plenty."

The tiefling's voice turned dry. "I have noticed that."

I smirked at him and popped the last piece of sticky bun into my mouth.

Nathyrra rocked back on her heels, frowning. "Vharzyym may not be working alone. This…" The former assassin reached out and delicately nudged the petals of the unfolded sphere with her forefinger. With a tiny _snick,_ the sphere came back together, and she picked it up, holding the sphere in one hand and a small crumpet in the other. "This, unless I miss my guess, is Ischarri handiwork. Few Houses in Lith My'athar have such skill in enchantment and goldsmithing."

My stomach still felt empty. These repeated cycles of getting my ass kicked and then getting healed were hard work. I picked up what looked like a miniature cupcake. "So I have Vharzyym and Ischarri conspiring to give me presents," I mused. "Isn't there a saying about this? Something like, 'Beware of drow bearing gifts.'?"

Valen was eying me sideways. "You are taking this more calmly than I would have expected."

I shrugged. "I'm a good actress," I said, and smiled. "Believe me when I tell you that under this calm exterior, I'm terrified beyond belief."

The tiefling studied my face. "You have that sphinx's smile again."

I blinked, stopped smiling, and shoved the last piece of the cupcake in my mouth to hide it. "Mm-hmm." There was a speck of frosting on my finger. I licked it off with a light swipe of my tongue. "So what?"

Valen's eyes rose to meet mine. He arched an eyebrow. "So I know that you are lying."

I had to bury my face in my coffee mug to mask my expression of horrified realization. Valen wasn't just way too perceptive for my own good – he was right. _God. They should lock me up and throw away the key._ I was afraid, but I also felt more alive than I had in a while. This was like chasing a high, only instead of needles in my veins and strange men in various other parts of me, there were daggers in the dark and there was danger around every corner, and….

…and I really should have spent more time in therapy, if _this_ was my idea of a good time.

Imloth crouched down beside Nathyrra, his face intent and all of his breezy indolence gone. "They are testing her."

Nathyrra looked sideways at Imloth. "Yes," she agreed. She frowned. "They are gathering information. They wish to see what she will do when offered a way out of this conflict."

I stared at her. The pieces clicked into place. I didn't know much about drow or the Planes or magic, but I knew this. This was just politics. "Holy shit," I said, with feeling.

Valen looked at me sharply. "What?"

I sank into the nearest chair, suddenly breathless. "They want to know whether they have to deal me in."

Nathyrra cocked her head at me. "Deal you in?"

One side of my mouth curled into a sick grin. My heart was pounding. I couldn't even tell whether it was from fear or excitement. Maybe both. "Whether I'll be joining the game."

A pair of blue eyes seemed to place me on a set of scales. "Are you?"

I shot him a scowl. "If I weren't, would I be sitting here right now?"

Nathyrra frowned. "What I would like to know is this: what message are Vharzyym and Ischarri attempting to send, and to whom?"

I thought about that, my irritation fading rapidly. Then I sat back, trying to put myself into the mindset of these drow, or at least what I imagined their mindset to be. "Maybe they want us to know they're working together," I said slowly. Then I jerked upright. "No. Wait. That's not right."

The Seer took the chair next to me, gracefully arranging her skirts before clasping her slim hands in her lap. "What are you thinking?" she asked, studying my face.

I grimaced. "I'm thinking that they weren't expecting me to know anything. I'm a human, a surfacer, and I only got here a few days ago."

Valen was frowning. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against the map table, watching me. "Meaning?" he prompted.

"Meaning the message was meant for the Seer," I said, nodding at the lady in question. "Not for me. If I ended up siding with her, they wanted _her_ to know they had their eye on me."

The Seer sighed. "These endless machinations are among the things that I did not regret leaving behind when I left the Underdark," she said ruefully. "Ah, well. Eilistraee forgive my people, for they know not what they do." She seemed to fall into thought for a moment. "But I believe you are correct. That the true message was meant for me would, alas, be in keeping with the attitude Lolth instills in those who follow her, that the drow are the superior race and all others exist to serve us."

Nathyrra pursed her lips. "It seems strange that they would take the trouble to make such a warning. Typically, one does not announce to a target that they are under observation. Not if you have any intention to strike."

"Unless the Seer's not a target," I mused. "Maybe this isn't a warning. Maybe it's an offer."

Nathyrra tilted her head. "An offer of support? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is a diversion from the true alliance."

I grunted. "So you think they're shoving flowers in our faces to distract us from whoever's sneaking up on our backs?"

Nathyrra shrugged. "In essence."

"Fan-fucking-tastic," I said, and sighed. "Well, at least the flowers are nice."

"Just wait until they send you a bouquet of vampiric roses," Valen muttered.

I blinked. "Those exist?"

"Yes."

"Great," I said drily. "Thanks for telling me that. My nightmares were getting repetitive. I needed some variety."

"You are welcome," said Valen, in pretty much the same tone.

"I was being sarcastic."

"So was I."

I laughed. "Touché." I leaned forward, smiling a little even as I rubbed the back of my aching neck. "What I still don't understand is why those two Houses are working together," I mused. "What do they have in common?"

Nathyrra frowned pensively. "Vharzyym's motives are often obscure, but they are not risk-takers. As for Ischarri, they are ambitious, and an alliance with a House of Vharzyym's stature will be to their advantage."

"Yes," I said. That made sense. If you didn't have leverage, you jumped on the back of someone who did. That was Power Politics 101. "But what's the occasion? Why join forces now?"

The ex-assassin's face was tense. "I do not know, but I suspect that one or more of them may be using the present turmoil to improve their position."

I stared at the floor, thinking. "Wartime's a prime time for coups."

The furrow in Nathyrra's forehead deepened. "Yes."

I met her eyes. "You think they're trying to overthrow Mae'vir?"

Nathyrra's luminous black eyes were troubled. "I do not know, but I fear that that may be the case."

Mae'vir was no friend to the Seer, but they'd thrown their support behind her, and they'd dragged Lith My'athar's other Houses into the alliance with them, some of them kicking and screaming. What, I wondered, would happen if Mae'vir went down? For that matter, what would happen if they stayed up – and changed their minds? "Are we sure Mae'vir is on our side?"

Nathyrra shrugged. "The only certainty among the drow is that they will support the winning side – whatever they perceive that to be."

Deekin looked up from his notes. "Er. That be our side, right? Deekin really hopes that be our side."

The Seer smiled down at the kobold. "Faith, little one. Right is on our side."

Nathyrra relaxed. So did Imloth, and Deekin, at least a little. I bit back a frown. _Yeah, okay, fine, right might even be on our side, but the Valsharess has an archdevil and overwhelming numbers on hers. Just sayin'._ I got that funny sensation that meant I was being watched and looked up to find Valen looking at me. Our eyes met like a pair of magnets. For once, I didn't have to struggle to read his expression at all. It said, in the deeply skeptical quirk of one eyebrow and twist of his lips, exactly the same thing I was thinking.

The Seer turned to me. "We do have brighter news. After much meditation and preparation, I was able to scry a little of the Valsharess's movements using Queen Shaori's mirror."

I pried my eyes away from Valen's. "Really?" I asked. A malicious grin touched my lips. "Oh, _tell_ me she was angry."

The Seer's smile took on a very slight hint of a very un-virtuous smugness. "Quite. It seems that you threw her into some disarray when you freed Halaster. She was forced to withdraw many of her troops from this region in order to salvage what she could from Undermountain."

Valen went back to the map. "As near as we can tell, it will take her close to a month to regroup and march on Lith My'athar," he said, gesturing. "Here. Take a look."

I stood and moved to his side, following his pointing finger with my eyes. There were lots of tiny little figures, like the most miniature of model miniatures, a couple of feet away from the model of Lith My'athar. I tried to gauge the distance. "That doesn't seem very far," I observed.

"It is by Underdark standards," Valen answered. "The Underdark is not only full of dangers, but its tunnels are twisting, and they do not just wind right and left, they also go up and down and are riddled with underground rivers and lakes and canyons. Nor can you reliably predict what obstacles you will come across, since earthquakes and cave-ins can change the lay of the land considerably. For instance, to go from here-" He pointed at a tiny cavern. "-to here-" He indicated another, just a finger's width away. "-is only a few thousand feet in a straight line, but a recent earthquake closed the main path between them, and the only alternative is a winding tunnel which is miles long and full of choke-points." He smiled grimly. "It is also one of the only ways to Lith My'athar from the Valsharess's last known position, and perhaps the only reason why this city is still standing."

My eyes scanned the map. "So we have a month," I said. Maybe, given a month, Valen would be able to make me into a halfway decent fighter. Maybe, given a month, I'd be able to figure out how to generate enough electricity to do more than give the Valsharess a little buzz. If not, well, maybe, given a month, Nathyrra would be able to teach me how to beg for mercy in drowish. "Well," I said then, sighing. "It's something."

Valen nodded, his face unreadable. "That it is," he murmured.

The Seer rose. "And we have something else for you, as well," she said. Her smile turned a little impish, and she came over to take my hands in hers. "Come," she urged. "It is in my quarters."

Saying no to the Seer was like saying no to my grandma, somehow. Besides, I was curious. "All right," I said, and let myself be led away – Deekin right at my heels and Valen, of course, following close behind us with one hand on his weapon, probably there to make sure I didn't trip up the Seer and steal her wallet or something.

I twitched my shoulders irritably. As soon as I started to feel kind of all right about the guy, he did something to remind me that he still didn't quite trust me, and it was as if we were back to square one and now I was ticked off at him again.

My irritation went away almost as soon as the Seer shoo'ed me into her chambers. There was a familiar-looking shirt of scales laid out on one of the sofas. I crossed to it, feeling a strange little rush of warmth. I'd never been so happy to see an article of clothing. "It's done already?" I said, picking it up carefully. I didn't know why. It was metal. It wasn't as if I could break it.

Valen stood with his arms crossed over his chest, watching me. "Rizolvir works quickly. Do not worry. He also works well."

I studied my armor. The ratio of steel to other materials had gone down a little further. Now, in addition to the more familiar patches, there was a patch of glossy green. "Mithril?" My voice squeaked. Mithril was fantastically expensive. I cleared my throat and tried to sound less like a debutante, but couldn't quite stop myself from stammering. "How did…you shouldn't have…"

Valen looked at my face. "Do not worry," he said, and tapped his forefinger against his breastplate. The mithril rang like a bell. "We had some scraps left over from when he made this."

These people were insane. They hardly knew me. I didn't deserve this. This was all just because the Seer had seen my face in a dream, but I'd seen all kinds of people in my dreams and I hadn't given away priceless metals to any of them. "You really didn't need to do that," I protested.

Valen shrugged. "Why not? The scraps were too small and too few to be useful for much else." A faint smile appeared on his face. "Besides, we already had them on hand, so if it makes you feel better, this actually cost less than the alternatives." He cleared his throat. "Rizolvir also polished it, strengthened the enchantment, and restitched some of the loose threads." He looked at me, the tip of his tail twitching curiously. "What have you been fighting? Rizolvir said your armor looked like it had been through wars. Plural."

I ran my hand over the fall of scales, listening to the musical noise they made. They were a lot smoother and shinier than they'd been in a long time. "No wars," I said absently. "But I wasn't kidding when I said a city fell on me."

The Seer poured three cups of tea and passed one to me. The other, to my surprise, she handed down to Deekin. "This was Undrentide, was it not?"

Deekin sniffed curiously at the tea. His eyes brightened. "Yeah," he confirmed. "Deekin was there. Nasty snake lady made Undrentide fly again by turning the old mythal back on. Boss broke the mythal with lightning. Also the whole city. Not with lightning, but once the mythal was gone, the city kind of stopped flying." He took a sip of tea. "Ooh. This be tasty. Thanks, pretty Seer lady."

The Seer smiled down at him. "You are welcome, my little friend." She gestured. "Your leather was also repaired," she said to me. "The artisans in this city are quite skilled. I think you will be pleased with the results."

I had blushed more times in the past three days than in the past three years. "You really didn't have to…"

The Seer waved an airy hand. "Nonsense," she tutted. She eyed my face and smiled gently. "If it makes you happier, consider it repayment for your help."

It didn't make me happier, really. I hadn't done anything anyone else here couldn't have done, and better, if only they'd tried. These were formidable people, a lot more formidable than me. Nonetheless, it looked like I was going to be the recipient of the Seer's generosity, whether I deserved it or not. I straightened my face, summoned a little diplomacy from somewhere, and said, "Thank you. I'll try to put it to good use."

Valen cleared his throat. "Might I suggest that you wear that immediately?" He had one hand on his weapon, like always, and he eyed the tapestries on the walls as if there might be drow assassins lurking behind them even now.

If I didn't know better, I might have thought he sounded nervous. I would have liked to argue with him, just on general principle, but he had a point. "Fine," I said, and began shrugging into my leather undercoat. Rizolvir had done an amazing job. Not only had he stitched the tear in my coat so neatly that I could hardly see the patch job, but he'd given it a good cleaning and buffing, so now it almost looked brown again.

The Seer watched me. "Would you like to discuss your next course of action?" she suggested. "Perhaps I might be able to offer some insight."

I started re-threading the laces that closed my coat. They'd all been undone, so it was a long process. "What do you know about golems?" I asked.

The Seer frowned. "Some," she said. She swirled the last of her tea in its cup and spoke slowly. "I…had a brother who was a mage, and who delighted in such creations." Sadness darkened her eyes almost to black. Then she sighed and went on, seeming to push the sadness away with a determined little lift of her chin. "They are often made of materials such as stone or metal, though some are made of the flesh of cadavers, and they can theoretically be made from almost any material which exists. They are generally quite resilient, particularly against magic. All are mindless, animated by the will of their creator and made to follow one or two basic imperatives."

I nodded, tightening my laces. "Who controls them?"

The Seer shrugged. "The one who has made them, as far as I know."

Deekin nodded. "Deekin tried to make a little mud golem once. It was real little, so not good for much, and it fell apart real quick, but it be true that as long as it still in one piece, nobody else could tell it what to do."

I blinked at the little bard. "You made a golem?"

Deekin grinned easily. "Sure. Old boss tried to teach Deekin to be a sorcerer, remember?" He shrugged. "It not work out so well, but hey. Deekin gotta remember a few things."

The Seer laughed softly. "You are full of surprises, my friend," she told the kobold. She lifted her white eyebrows, smiling. "What made you choose music over magic, if I may ask?"

Deekin looked down bashfully and scuffed his toe in the carpet. "Oh, that just be because Deekin liked reading stories about epic heroes better than studying," he confessed. "Also, old boss be hoping that Deekin become chief, and Deekin really not want to stay in the caves and have to tell the other stupid kobolds what to do all the time, especially because kobolds not really listen very well."

I tied off my laces and tucked the free ends under my collar. "I hadn't noticed," I said drily.

The kobold made a face at me. "Hey, Deekin listens. Maybe he not always do what you say, but he listens."

Valen looked at me curiously. "You are thinking of visiting this Maker's isle?"

"Sure. Why not? From what you told me, this Maker keeps to himself, if he's even there at all, so he probably isn't hostile. Worst comes to worst, we'll just find a ruin, maybe some useful salvage," I said with a shrug, picking up my armor and shaking it out to make the scales lay right. "Best case, he's friendly and he'll be willing to talk about loaning us some golems." And while there was a possibility that this Maker could be dangerous, there was no doubt that the beholders and mindflayers were dangerous, and pants-shittingly so. "Plus, you say it's not far," I added. I dropped my mail over my head, my voice going muffled momentarily. "So if it leads to nothing, we won't have wasted much time."

Valen frowned. "What you say makes sense," he said. Then he hesitated, glancing at the Seer. "If you do not know what you are walking into, however, you should not go alone. Seer, with your permission-"

The Seer smiled at him. "Go, with my blessing," she said. "The situation here is stable, and she needs your help more than we do, right now."

The tiefling nodded, seeming satisfied. He turned to me. "We should leave as soon as possible. I will speak to Imloth right away." A faint smirk curved the tiefling's lips. "He is obviously in need of entertainment, so I am sure he will be delighted to oversee things in my absence." He turned to the Seer and bowed. "Mother Seer." He gave me a speculative look. "Windwalker. Shall I meet you outside in, say, half a candlemark?"

If I moved fast enough, I thought I could beat that. "You're on."


	30. Golem

_A/N: *dashes in, hits 'post', dashes out again* Surprise weekend present! Enjoy!_

 _PS: Some people mentioned they didn't have a clear mental image of Rebecca, so I added a pic to my profile. Nothing 100% matches my own mental image of her, but the cover image here and pic in my profile should get you close enough. Check it out if you're curious._

* * *

 _We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue  
And then we'll take it higher  
Oh we gonna rock down to Electric Avenue  
And then we'll take it higher_

\- Eddy Grant, "Electric Avenue"

~*~  
Chapter 30: Golem  
~*~

I watched the wake of the boat part behind us, a sharp vee of white foam rising on the black, black water.

The Dark River was aptly named. I'd never realized how much the color of water depended on the light from the sun and sky. Without those things, water didn't reflect light – it swallowed it.

The Dark River's voice, on the other hand, swallowed nothing. Its voice murmured continuously, magnified and distorted into eerie, lingering echoes by the stone that surrounded it. Water gurgled, tinkled, rushed, trickled, hissed, and sometimes _plipp_ 'ed.

We passed through regions of light and shadow. When the river's banks were broad enough, phosphorescent lawns of moss and fungus provided a soft glow, so I could actually see decently. Not well. But I wasn't blind, at least not until we hit the regions of black, where the banks rose so steeply that nothing, not even moss, grew.

When we passed through the black, I just closed my eyes and held on, cold sweat trickling down my back. When we were in the black, I felt my heart bang against the cage of my chest like an inmate in an asylum. When we were in the black, Deekin crowded against my leg and patted my hand, whispering consoling words I couldn't quite hear over the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.

We were just passing into another region of shadow when Valen spoke. "Windwalker. Listen to me."

I tried to pry my fingers from the boat rail. "Yeah?"

I heard a creak and clink as Valen shifted. "I…wished to ask you a question," he said. Faintly, I saw him nod towards me. "I could not help but notice. Are those white dragon scales?"

I blinked and looked down at myself, although I didn't know why. I couldn't see much. "Yeah." There were two red lights reflecting on my newly polished armor. I looked up and blinked again. "Holy crap. Are those your eyes?"

The lights went out for a split second as Valen blinked, then came back on. "Yes."

"Oh," I said, and swallowed. So his eyes glowed like coals when it got really dark. _Fine_. I wished he'd warned me beforehand, that was all. I'd have packed an extra change of underwear. "Y-you can see in the dark?"

I couldn't see his face any more, but his voice was flat. "Yes."

And now I'd upset him by freaking out about his eyes, I just knew it _._ Hurting Valen's feelings was like shooting fish in a barrel, and I wasn't exactly the world's expert at not hurting other people's feelings to begin with. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…I mean, it's fine. I was just surprised, that's all." I groped behind me and sat down on what felt like a coil of rope. "You were saying?"

Valen went on, his voice a little terse. "I was just wondering where you came across dragon scales. Did you battle a dragon?"

Deekin's voice piped up. "Those look like they belong to old boss. Deekin clean those scales often enough. He'd recognize them anywhere."

The fiery glow of Valen's eyes shifted to where the kobold's voice had come from. "Your old master was a dragon?"

"Yeah. Tymofarrar the White. Big. Smelly. Fat. Grumpy, but maybe that just be because he gots to deal with kobolds all the time. Otherwise, he not be so bad." I felt a dry, scaly hand pat mine. "Deekin ran away, though, 'cause he wanted to see the world, only the world turned out to be pretty scary when Deekin was all alone, so he asked Boss to take him with her."

"And she said yes?"

Deekin giggled. "We-llll, not at first. First she say-" The kobold lowered his voice and did what I would have called a distinctly unflattering impression of me. "She say, 'Go 'way, don't talk to me, why are you following me, somebody get me a drink.'" His voice returned to normal. "But eventually she say, 'Okay fine come along but no funny business'."

I rubbed my forehead. "Deeks…"

"Sorry, Boss, but it be true." The kobold placed one hand over his heart. "Deekin cannot tell a lie."

I snorted. "Yes, you can. I've heard you do it." I straightened, realizing that I could see again. A little light was coming back as the river passed into a more open space. I mopped a little sweat from my forehead. My hand was shaking. "Anyway, yeah," I said then, because I was pretty sure if I kept arguing with Deekin he'd just find more ways to make fun of me. "The scales came from Tymofarrar. They were a gift."

The tiefling's voice was disbelieving. "The dragon? A white dragon _gave_ you its scales?"

I shrugged. "Maybe I used the wrong word. They were probably more like payment."

"Ah," Valen said, sounding satisfied. "That makes more sense. What did you trade for the scales?"

"A story and a stack of pies."

Valen paused for a long time before answering. "I beg your pardon?"

I found a teasing little smile somewhere. "Granted, but why? Did you do something wrong?"

Valen stared at me. "You gave a dragon _pies_?"

Deekin shrugged. "Sure. Why not? Pies is tasty."

I felt like maybe this needed a little more explanation. At least, judging by the look on Valen's face, it did. "They're his favorite food, and there's a tavern a couple towns away from his lair that's famous for their mumbleberry pies." I looked down at Deekin. "You remember Mara at the Bubbling Cauldron, don't you, Deeks?"

The kobold grinned in reminiscence. "Yeah," he said dreamily. "She had pretty yellow hair, and she call Deekin a smelly kobold and hit him with a broom. It was really itchy."

Valen looked back and forth between us. "I see."

"I know what you're thinking," I hastened to add. At least, I thought I knew what he was thinking. It was still kind of dark, and the tiefling had his poker face on again. "But Tymofarrar's not actually that bad. I mean, he's not nice, by any means, but he's lazy as hell and he's surrounded himself by kobolds, so now he's so desperate for decent company that he'll only kill visitors if they try to kill him. Or if they're even more annoying than the kobolds, although that's not easy."

Deekin's head bobbed. "That be true. Especially the part about kobolds being annoying."

Valen grimaced. "On that, we can agree."

The kobold huffed. "Oh, come on," he protested, drawing himself to his full height, which admittedly wasn't much. "Deekin be least annoying kobold in the whole tribe."

The tiefling snorted. "That is damning with very faint praise."

I rubbed my temples. "Play nice, boys."

Deekin hmph'ed. "He started it."

Valen shot the kobold a scowl. " _I_ started it?"

 _Shaundakul grant me patience._ "I don't care who started it, as long as it doesn't keep going!" I shouted. My voice echoed over the water. I resisted the urge to tear my hair out by the roots. Barely. "God, you two bicker like an old married couple."

Valen's scowl turned into a grimace. "What a horrifying thought."

Deekin wrinkled his snout. "Yeah, Deekin gotta agree with you there."

Well, at least they were agreeing on _something_. I tried to steer the conversation back on track. " _Anyway_ , the last time I was in the area, I decided to stop by Tymofarrar's lair. He'd just finished molting, so he gave me a few scales in exchange for the company. And the food."

Valen stared at me. "You did not defeat the dragon in combat?"

I barked a laugh. "Why the hell would I wanna do that?"

The tiefling frowned. "To prove your martial prowess?"

My laugh lasted a little longer this time. "What martial prowess?" I asked. I clasped my hands between my knees to hide the shaking, which still hadn't stopped even though the lights had come back on. My knee jiggled nervously. "Besides, I'm lazy. Why fight if you don't have to?"

Valen rubbed his forehead. "All right," he said. "Let me try to understand this."

I spread my hands wide, offering myself up to his questioning. "Take your time," I said expansively. "I'll be here all day."

"Good."

"Why?"

Valen's voice went dry. "Because this might take all day." He started counting items on his fingers. "First of all, you claim to be a poor fighter, and lazy as well."

Like Deekin, I could not tell a lie. "Guilty as charged."

Valen droned on relentlessly. "Second, in spite of this, you routinely stroll into evil dragons' lairs?"

"Not really. It was only that one time."

"Oh. Well, that changes everything."

I squinted at him in the dim light. "Was that sarcasm?"

Valen's face went blank. "No, not at all." Then he went on without giving me a chance to reply. "Lastly, you successfully bought the scales off a white dragon's back with…baked goods?" He put his head to one side. "Am I understanding that correctly?"

"Basically? Yeah." I leaned back, crossing my arms over my chest. The man had that putting-together-a-puzzle look on his face again. "So what does that tell you about me?"

Valen raised his eyebrows. Then he blew out a breath and shook his head. "It tells me that you are either a very simple woman or a very complicated one." He leaned back against the ship's rail, crossing his arms over his chest. "And that you may not be entirely sane."

Enserric rippled red. "Not entirely sane? Hah! The woman is madder than a sack of rabid weasels."

Deekin scowled. "You be nice to Boss, both of you," he chided. His talons gripped the cuffs of my boots. "She be the first person who ever be nice to little Deekin and not call him a stupid, smelly kobold."

"Your honor," Enserric intoned. "The prosecution rests."

I winced. "In all fairness, Deeks, I have called you dumb. Multiple times."

The kobold shrugged. "Well, yeah, but the point is you only calls Deekin dumb 'cause he did something dumb, not 'cause he be a kobold."

Valen looked at Deekin for a long moment. Then he dipped his head. "I apologize," he said curtly. "I did not mean to insult your…boss." He turned his fierce blue-eyed gaze to me. "Are you feeling better now?"

So he _had_ noticed my little problem. I flushed. Had he started this whole conversation just to keep my mind off of the pressing dark? If so, I…wasn't really sure how to feel about that. "Yeah." My arms tightened around my chest. "Sorry. I…don't like closed spaces. Or not seeing where I'm going."

Deekin patted my knee comfortingly. "A mountain fell on Boss once," he explained.

Valen raised his eyebrows. It was hard to tell, in this light, but I thought he looked a little amused. "This is in addition to the city?"

I swallowed. "Yeah. I got caught in an avalanche." I aimed for a light, dismissive tone. Complaining about getting buried under a few tons of snow seemed like whining about nothing, when I was talking to somebody who'd spent years in literal Hell. I cast around for some way to change the subject. "I think we're getting close."

Deekin hopped to the prow, his claws digging into the rail as he pulled himself up to see. "Is that it? Just a little island with a building on it?"

A hollow chuckle echoed over the river. "Wise wayfarers see beneath the surface of things, while fools are pulled under by what lies beneath," Cavallas said. Deftly, he poled his boat into the shallows – giving the boat a push, then waiting patiently until some hidden sign told him to push again, and so on through a seeming maze of shoals. "We are here." Another push, then a long, slow drift until we came to a stop just shy of the shore, the boat's hull barely kissing the rocks there. Cavallas turned. The folds of his cowl barely shifted as his head turned, but the light didn't touch the shadows within his cowl, which were as thick as clotted blood. "Welcome to the Isle of the Maker," he intoned, and bowed to me. "Wayfarer."

I eyed Cavallas sideways. "Yeah. Okay. Thanks for the ride, Uncle Fester." I stood. There was another boat moored nearby, a dark metal tub more utilitarian than pretty. "Looks like we're not the only visitors," I said. I squinted. There was a small camp of people not far from the quay. They were short, grey-haired, and grey-skinned. "Huh. Those look like duergar."

Valen came to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me. "So they do." He stared them down, his hand on his weapon. "I sense no hostility from them, but still, we should be careful."

I didn't particularly trust the duergar myself – Nathan Hurst had made it clear that he was the exception among his people, not the rule - but at the same time, I was almost positive that you could give Valen a basket of day-old kittens and he wouldn't trust _them_ , either. He'd probably accuse them of mewing at him suspiciously. "Well, if they're not attacking, it won't hurt to talk to them," I said, and started down the gangplank without waiting to see if the others would follow. After a moment, two pairs of footsteps echoed mine - Deekin's scratchy scurry, and Valen's resolute march.

A strange change came over Valen's walk as we got nearer to the duergar camp, though. His normal businesslike stride loosened up into an aloof, dangerous strut, not so much a threat as a warning. ' _Don't fuck with me, or I'll fuck you up,'_ his posture seemed to say. Even his tail joined in the party, its restless side-to-side sway taking on a cocky little snap.

I stared at him. I'd seen those moves before. Not in my old neighborhood, maybe – that kind of body language would have gotten him arrested back home, even if the cops had to make up charges out of thin air - but I knew an inner city swagger when I saw one. What the hell was it doing on _him_?

One of the duergar came forward. She was wearing dark, purplish mail and carried a hooked axe at her hip. Her hand hovered near the handle, but she didn't draw. "Come no farther, surfacer," she called. "We're not looking for a fight, but we'll give one if we have to. I am Dahanna, the leader of this group. What are your intentions here?"

I drew to a stop. Valen stuck to my side like a burr, smoldering with an attitude that was half-soldier, half-gangster, and all danger. I could feel it going to my head. Maybe that was why I decided to take a gamble. These folks hadn't attacked us and probably didn't want to get steamrolled by a drow army – maybe they'd be willing to lend us a hand, if only out of self interest. "I'm not here to cause trouble, just to stop someone else from doing it," I said. "Ever hear of the Valsharess?"

The duergar woman's eyebrows lifted. "Aye, I think I've heard of her. She's a drow matron who's been stirring the pot lately, isn't she?"

"You could call it that," I said drily. I nodded at Valen. "She's trying to conquer most of the Underdark. We're looking for people to help stop her."

Dahanna nodded. "Luck," she said. A sardonic grin curled her grey lips. "You'll need it." She gestured at the stony island around us. "You're welcome to trade with us. Explore, too, if it makes you happy. Long as you don't poach on our turf, I don't much care what you do."

Her dismissal was obvious. "But you're not willing to help."

Dahanna snorted. "I've seen power-hungry drow matrons rise, and I've seen them fall. Every time, they fall well before their eyes turn to us. No, it's best if we just steer clear of drow politics. There's nothing to be gained from it and much to be lost."

Valen scowled. "So what are you doing here, so close to Lith My'athar?" he demanded.

The duergar woman answered calmly enough. "We are collectors. We have been salvaging scrap from this ruin, or trying to. The ruin was built by a duergar sorcerer called the Maker. Legend has it he came here to figure out how to build sentient golems, though we've seen no such thing, just the usual mindless shambling statues. Still, if you can take one down and get to it before they get repaired, there's good money to be made."

I blinked. "If the Maker's gone, who repairs them?"

"A scavenger golem," Dahanna answered. "It roams the halls, putting falling golems back together. Worse, it seems to have strong magical defenses, and if we attack it, it just teleports away, so there's no way to stop it. It's why we haven't made it past the first level of the ruin, although there's obviously more to it than we've managed to explore. If you're going in there, I'd advise finding a way to neutralize it, else you won't get far."

Valen's voice was deeply skeptical. "Why would you share this information?"

Dahanna shrugged. "Simple. If you make it further than we did and survive, you're probably formidable, and there's more to be gained by being on your good side than by provoking you." She smiled thinly. "And if you don't make it, well, your corpses should have some good salvage on them."

I put a hand in front of Valen's chest, moving slowly and keeping the motion where he could see it. I still remembered how he'd jumped when I'd startled him before, and how Imloth had approached him, and he had a hint of red in his eyes right then – nothing more than a glint, and even that only when the light caught his eyes a certain way, but it was there. "Thanks for the advice," I said, and ushered him away before he could lose his temper.

The tiefling came along reluctantly. "You seem remarkably willing to deal with these duergar," he said, glancing back over his shoulder. "I, for one, do not trust them."

 _Honey, you don't trust anyone,_ I thought sadly. That thought dulled the sarcastic retort rising in my throat. "I don't, either," was all I said instead. "But I do trust my gut." It was a hell of a lot more reliable than my brain, that was for sure.

"And what does your gut tell you?'

"It tells me that Dahanna's not really malicious, she's just trying make a buck." I glanced sideways at the tiefling's confused expression, and added, "Make some money, that is."

Valen's face took on the sudden glow of enlightenment. "Ah. You mean score some jink."

"Oh! You mean bag some bits," Deekin put in helpfully.

I grinned. "See? I think we're finally starting to understand each other." Shadows pressed closely around us. I palmed my fluorstone and breathed some light into it. "Now, let's go meet the Maker."

* * *

The halls of the Maker were alive with light.

Lamps fizzed in stone recesses, shooting blue-white sparks. I stared at them. They didn't quite look like the lightbulbs I knew from my old world – the lights here that were intact didn't emit that steady lightbulb glow, but flickered as if someone had caught lightning in a bottle – but they weren't torches or magelights, either, and somewhere I thought I heard an electric hum, eerie in its familiarity.

The building around us was put together of perfectly squared-off stones, almost like cement blocks. I felt like I'd stepped into a bunker – an impression aided by the fizzing lights and the stale, dusty smell. Two halls split off of the entrance chamber, running roughly east-west. They looked identical, so I turned to the east and led the way down a meandering hall, lined with doors.

"We need to be careful," Valen murmured to me. His eyes scanned the shadows, and his stance was on high alert. "You can feel the potent magic lingering in the air, here."

I felt a chill. Also, I could feel a little fizz in the air from the broken lights, but that wasn't magic, that was just electricity. Aside from that, nada. "Er. You can?"

Valen gave me one of those odd looks that seemed to mean I'd said or done something he found incomprehensible, startling, or both. "Yes. Can you not feel it?"

I grimaced. "As an old friend of mine liked to say, I'm about as magically sensitive as a petrified tree stump. Sorry."

Valen looked startled. "Oh." Then he shrugged, too. "Perhaps, as planetouched, I am more sensitive to such things."

Or maybe, as somebody who came from a world with no magic, that part of my brain either didn't exist or had atrophied from disuse. Or maybe, as Xanos maintained, I was just plain dense. Who knew? Who cared? Knowing the reasons wouldn't change the facts. "Well, just let me know if any potent magic comes our way," I said. I nodded to the hall. "Now let's be quiet for a second. I'm seeing a lot of dead bodies up ahead."

The corpses were grey-skinned, and not just from decay – they were duergar salvagers, killed by who knew what. I knelt by one of them and sank into my second sight. Then I turned away, my stomach heaving. "Don't know what killed him," I choked. I stood hurriedly, my hand to my mouth. "Nothing sharp." There were no open wounds on him, but I'd seen the remnants of broken bones, rising from the sea of decay like broken masts from a hidden shoal. I staggered a few feet away and bent over with my hands on my knees, trying to breathe shallowly. "Gah. That was disgusting."

A boot scraped as Valen stepped closer. "Are you all right?"

I nodded without looking up. "Looked a little too deep, that's all." I swallowed hard. "Poor bastard's insides looked like borscht."

"Borscht?"

"A kind of soup." I shuddered. "Don't ask."

"Ah." Armor creaked as Valen turned to glance at the corpse. "I suppose death is even less pretty to a healer's eyes than to mine."

I snorted. "I'm no healer. But death's not pretty to me, either." I spared Valen a sickly smile that was meant to be reassuring but didn't quite make it there. "I'll be fine. Just give me a minute."

Valen hesitated. "As you wish," he said, before moving away to keep an eye on the corridor.

Deekin crouched by the corpse, studying it with bright-eyed curiousity. "He gots weapons," the kobold announced. "And lots of other stuff, too." He swung his pack from his back and started stuffing things into it with busy little hands – neatly slicing purses from the duergar's belt, reaching into pockets and pulling out stones and coins and vials. His claws closed on a dagger and tugged it loose. He flipped it over and examined the hilt. Then he brought the blade to his nostrils and sniffed it. "Ooh. Enchanted. Sweet." The kobold slipped the dagger under his belt and his pack back onto his shoulder. The corpse was looking a little poorer and thinner now than it had been before Deekin got to it. "Want Deekin to scout ahead for traps, Boss? His little kobold peepers probably be better than yours for this stuff. No offense."

I couldn't argue, especially since my stomach was still churning a little. "Sure, sweetie. Just be careful."

Deekin grinned. "Deekin always be careful," he said, and snuck ahead, singing softly until he vanished, the invisibility starting at the tip of his nose and moving to the tip of his tail as if some huge eraser had come and swiped him out of existence.

Valen stuck close to my side as we crept through the hall, as if he'd gotten into the habit of being the Seer's bodyguard and now he felt weird without someone to protect. "You care deeply for that kobold, don't you?" he asked softly.

I glanced sidelong at him. "He has a name. You might want to try using it."

It was hard to tell in this light, but I thought the tiefling's cheeks reddened. "I…beg your pardon."

"Don't beg mine. Beg Deekin's." I looked forward again. "But yes. I do. He's a good friend."

Valen was quiet for a few moments. "I must admit, he is remarkably resourceful."

I chuckled. "You have no idea," I whispered. "He killed a medusa sorceress, you know."

The tiefling blinked and looked at me sharply. "He what?"

"He killed Heurodis. He gave me credit for the kill in his book, probably 'cause he thought it made for better copy, but Deeks was actually the one who did the honors. She'd just hit my friend Xanos with a fireball and stabbed me in the lung. She was busy gloating when Deeks snuck up behind her and knifed her." I smirked. "Boy, was she surprised." A low whistle came out of the gloom, cutting short my trip down memory lane. "Come on. Sounds like he's found something."

Deekin was visible again, lying on his stomach on the floor with his roll of tools open next to him and a pair of what looked like very long tweezers in his hand. "This be tricky," he said, and nodded. "See the holes in the floor? Those be for spikes, but there be vents, too. Those be for gas, and they both real close together, so Deekin gotta disarm one first without setting off the other."

I crouched behind him, ready to grab him by the tail and yank him back if I had to. "I've got full confidence in you, Deeks," I reassured him. "You worked for Tymofarrar. You should know all about gas."

Deekin snickered. "Very funny, Boss." Carefully, he reached into one of the holes with his tweezers and fished around. There was a click, and the kobold's tail went very still. Then, after a moment, he relaxed. "O-kay," he said, and carefully drew his tool back. "We probably be good now."

"Probably?" Valen muttered.

"Hey, you never know until you step on it," Deekin answered, pushing himself up into a crouch. There was a chunk of rock lying nearby, probably fallen from the ceiling. He picked it up in one hand, hefted it, then threw it at the ground in front of him. Nothing happened. "O-kay. So far, so good." Tentatively, he took a step forward. Still nothing happened. Then he shrugged and hopped right onto the spike trap, bouncing a little on his toes before turning back to me and frowning. "Boss? Why you look like you gonna faint?"

I swallowed and tried to erase the image of a sad little impaled kobold body from my brain. "No reason," I said weakly. "Just…please don't turn yourself into a kobold kebab, Deeks. I don't think I could fix that."

The kobold grinned. "Don't worry, Boss, Deekin got this," the kobold said, and led the way down the hall, humming until he vanished again.

The hall got darker, although never truly dark. Little arcs of electricity sometimes flashed above our heads. I could feel the tingle on my tongue when I tasted the air. There was _lightning_ here, thank Shaundakul. As I walked, I gathered little sparks and strands of it, the fingers on my free hand flexing as I felt electricity begin to buzz against my skin.

By rights, what I was doing shouldn't have been possible – normal people couldn't grab the equivalent of a live wire and survive, much less hold on to it. Then again, normal people couldn't control the wind or turn themselves into clouds, either. Whatever Shaundakul had turned me into, it obviously wasn't a normal person.

Progress was slow and careful, with Deekin nosing ahead, invisible, and Valen and I both trying not to scuff our boots too loudly or kick over any buckets. I noticed that the tiefling wasn't much quieter than me, although at least he jingled less.

There were more corpses. Deekin paused to search them, his quick little hands making short work of whatever valuables were left, little baubles popping out of visibility as he stuffed them into his sack. We passed metal doors with writing on them, strange runes in a language I couldn't begin to fathom. At each door, all three of us readied weapons, listened, and then shoved the door open, braced for a fight. We needn't have bothered. The rooms were storerooms, empty except for dust and bare shelves. We were far from the first to be here.

We were almost to a bend in the hall when I heard a heavy, hair-raising scraping sound, like rocks grinding together.

A figure rounded the bend. Sparking little lights shone on stone, chiseled to resemble an armored figure, complete with a helm and visor. Yellow light came through the slit in the visor where the thing's eyes would have been. An inhuman voice came from its still and lipless mouth, saying a brief phrase I didn't understand. Then the golem headed our way, slowly but with the inexorability of a rockslide.

Valen tensed. "Stone golem," he snapped. "Stay back. Edged weapons are useless on them." Then, without waiting for me to answer, he charged at the thing.

Just before the tiefling got within arm's reach of the advancing golem, he dropped below the golem's swinging fists and slid between its legs, feet-first. His flail whistled as he passed, a one-two bash at the inner sides of the golem's knees before he reached the other side and turned his slide into a roll that took him back on his feet in one deft motion.

The golem paused and looked down at its legs. Yellow light spilled out from the cracks, lava-like. Then the construct started turning ponderously, trying to catch the reckless red-haired maniac who was busy bashing chips off of its backside.

A shout came from my left. Deekin popped into visibility. He had a clay bottle in his hands. I thought it looked familiar. "Hey, stone man!" he yelled. "Catch!" Then he threw the bottle, hard.

The bottle crashed against the golem in a shower of some clear liquid, and wherever the liquid touched the golem, the stone almost seemed to melt, softening into something far more pliable than rock.

Valen danced backwards ahead of the golem's swing, taking in the shattered bottle and suddenly wilting construct with a glance. Then, apparently not bothering to question why his opponent had just gone flaccid, he took the opportunity and went after it, his entire body going into a tight spin and his flail whirling over his head. His first hit crunched through a stone fist as it swung at him. The golem threw a punch with its remaining hand. Valen ducked under it, dropping smoothly into something like a gymnast's half-split before shooting right back up as if his muscles were spring-loaded. He knocked a few more chips off of the golem's unprotected side with a vicious strike of his flail, then sprang away again, too fast for it to follow.

The golem seemed to be having trouble moving, as if its softening legs could no longer support its weight. It sagged. The flail struck, again and again, as the golem lumbered in circles, groping after its much quicker opponent. More cracks opened and chunks of rock fell.

Then the golem finally managed to turn to face its attacker, just in time for a flail to slam into its face.

 _Lights out,_ I thought, and watched the golem disintegrate in a shower of rock, the lights in its visor flickering and dying.

Valen backed away from the rubble. "Good thinking, kobold," he complimented Deekin. He sounded a little surprised.

Deekin grinned. "Thanks, goat-man."

I tried to catch my breath, which was ridiculous, because all I'd been doing was standing there and watching while Valen did all the work. It shouldn't have been possible for a man to move like he did, and if it _was_ possible, it should have been outlawed. "What was that potion?"

Deekin glanced at me. "It be the potion of stone-to-flesh we found in Undrentide," he explained. His eyes glittered smugly. "You didn't use it all up on mean green man, so Deekin took the rest. Waste not, want not, eh?"

Maybe the kobold's packrat tendencies had a few advantages, after all. "Good w-" I caught movement coming around the corner again. "Crap. Incoming!"

Footsteps hit the ground, this time with the hollow boom of metal. A head came around the corner. It was a bull's head, made of finely articulated metal plates, and it was mounted on a humanoid body, only with hooves instead of feet. When the clockwork minotaur saw us, it hissed a word or two, snorted out a cloud of steam, lowered its horned head, and charged.

This golem was a hell of a lot faster than the last one, and it moved with unnatural fluidity for something that looked like it had come from a forge.

Valen whirled, spat a word I didn't catch but sounded like a curse, and had to throw himself flat to the wall to avoid getting gored.

Of course, that left _me_ standing right in the minotaur's path. "Boss!" I heard Deekin yell. "It's made of metal! Hit it with lightning!"

I stared. That was a brilliant idea. I had such smart friends.

Power flared in my chest. I reached out and drew in. Little sparks zipped out of the lights and flew to my fingers. They gathered there until my head was buzzing and my ears were ringing and my hand was glowing blue-white. The whole exercise must have taken an instant, but it felt like forever until a lightning bolt finally formed in the palm of my hand.

I hurled it.

The bolt hit the clockwork minotaur with a spectacular crack and a horrible, high-pitched scream of tearing metal. A pile of twisted metal hit the ground and screeched to a stop a few feet away from me, shooting sparks. I stared at it, then stared at my hand. Then I started laughing. "Finally," I gasped. I felt almost wild with relief. Just because I could, I lured a spark to my fingertip and crooned at it. "Oh, baby, it's so good to have you back."

Valen was giving me a very odd look. Again. As usual. "Are you certain you do not have any planar influences in your bloodline?" His eyes went to my hair. "Something from the Elemental Plane of Air, perhaps?"

"Positive. Why do you-" I reached up to touch my hair, and cringed a little at the feel of so many flying, snapping wisps of hair. "Oh." I tried to pat my hair down, but only succeeded in riling it up even more. "Sorry. This is what happens when I play with lightning." It didn't usually get this bad, but then, it was usually raining when I did this kind of thing aboveground. "It'll settle down in a minute."

If anything, Valen's expression got odder. "There is no need to apologize." He looked at me a moment longer, then jerked his head, indicating the empty hall. "Let us move on. It is obviously not wise to linger here."

The next figure to emerge from the far shadows hanging over the Maker's hall was nothing like the rest. It was a shambling thing, a Frankenstein's monster of assorted fleshy parts, loosely stitched together, and it neither looked at us nor changed its pace as it came lurching down the hall, mumbling some phrase over and over.

The sound of a scribbling quill was a little incongruous, but not a big surprise. "What was that?" Deekin asked. "You guys hear that? What it be saying?"

The flesh golem had stopped at the pile of former stone golem and was patiently stacking rocks back on top of each other. As it worked, smaller pebbles and particles of dust began to glow and drift together, filling in the cracks.

Valen stared. Then his eyes widened in comprehension. "Hellfire," he swore. "That is the scavenger golem. It is trying to repair the others."

Deekin's crossbow thunked. Right before his bolt hit, the scavenger golem seemed to give a startled flicker. Then it vanished, and the bolt hit the far wall. "Well, at least that stopped it," the kobold said.

The pile of rocks trembled. Then they all flew upwards, reassembling themselves into a rough man-shape, which turned a yellow stare on us.

Deekin gulped. "Or not," he quavered.

I heard the rapidly-growing-familiar rattle of a heavy chain. Valen's sigh was resigned. "Not again," he grumbled, and took a step forward.

"Wait," I said. "Hold still a second." I put a hand on his arm, breathed in, breathed out, and let a little swift-running power flow into him with my breath. Then I let go. "All right. Go get 'em, tiger."

Valen blinked as the rush filled him. Then he smirked in understanding and leapt into motion.

The stone golem didn't stand a chance against a turbocharged tiefling, even without Deekin's potion to soften the golem up. My lightning, surprisingly enough, opened up a few cracks, but it was Valen's flail that made stone chips fly like snowflakes in a blizzard and deep fissures open up all over the golem's body. It wasn't long before the thing finally crumbled again.

Valen jogged back. He didn't even seem winded. "Invigorating," he observed laconically. "Thank you for the spell. That was very helpful." He looked over his shoulder. "Now, shall we move on before I must kill that thing a third time?"

He didn't have to ask me twice. We crept on, eyes peeled. Silently, I thanked the Maker for the foresight to install lights, even if half of them were on the fritz. My human eyes weren't up to penetrating this darkness by themselves.

Another corner, and another clockwork minotaur appeared, stalking the halls as if it was on patrol. My lightning and Valen's flail put it down. No telling whether it was the same one from before – if it wasn't, it was so identical it was indistinguishable.

The hall branched. There was a niche at the end of it, with an enormous suit of armor standing in it – or at least it _looked_ like a suit of armor until its eyes opened and it stepped down from its niche, moving with well-oiled smoothness.

Then the suit of armor spoke, and unhinged its jaws, sending a cloud of acrid green something boiling down the hall.

A whiff of the stuff burned in my lungs and blinded my eyes with tears. I coughed and fell against the wall. I could hear the others coughing, hear heavy footsteps, feel them vibrating in the stone. There was a shout and a clang of metal meeting metal. Then: another clang, followed by the thud of a human-sized body hitting the wall, and a snarl of pain. _Wind,_ I thought desperately, _I need wind_ , and I reached out, pulling hard. The air was heavy, still. I held my breath and pushed at it harder, until spots were dancing in front of my eyes.

I felt a little whisker of air tickle my cheek. Then another, and another, and finally, the cloud rolled back enough to let me breathe, although it stalled soon after. There just wasn't enough _air._

The iron golem emerged from the cloudbank. It had a couple of dents, and it was driving Valen back with its swinging fists as the tiefling ducked and dodged, waiting for an opening. His eyes were red-tinged, and he was breathing hard.

I sucked in a hoarse breath, my head swimming. "Hey, scrap-for-brains!" I yelled, and yanked in all the electricity I could. In the heat of the moment, my accent took a nosedive all the way from the penthouse to the streets. "Yeah, I'm talkin' to you! Over here!"

The golem looked up at the sound of my voice, just before a lightning bolt earthed itself in its face. It seemed to blink, then shiver as lightning crackled all over it. It raised its arm, its movements sluggish and jerky, as if the electricity was making it short-circuit.

A crossbow bolt lodged itself in one of the golem's joints. "Keep going, Boss!" Deekin shouted. "You're slowing it down!"

And Valen was there, counting on me to keep that thing distracted. I gritted my teeth. Then I drew in a stream of power from the fizzing lights, from the pop of static in the air, from every colliding pair of air molecules I could find. A crackling white line appeared between me and the golem, spasming with a frenetic energy. The golem slowed further and further until it stopped, twitching and sending off little showers of sparks.

Valen took advantage of the golem's short-circuit and bashed its head in. It dropped. "Piker," he gasped. Abruptly, he turned and lashed out with his flail, once, twice, gouging a shallow hole in the stone wall. Then he stood, breathing hard. He had one hand on his chest, and his eyes flickered rapidly between red and blue.

I took a step forward. "Valen?" I said, tentative. I coughed. My throat still burned. "You all right?"

The tiefling's head jerked. He spared me a glance. "Yes," he said. He straightened painfully. "Just…a cracked rib, I think." He drew in a deep and careful breath, then coughed and winced. "Damned thing was fast. Managed to knock me into the wall."

I was afraid he wasn't in any state to deal with another golem, at least not until he could catch his breath and I could get a healing potion into him. I looked around quickly. There was a door close by. "Deeks," I said, pointing. "Check that room out. Tell me if it's safe."

The kobold nodded, vanished, and scurried away. The door creaked open. A voice came from the other side. "Seems okay, Boss," he said. "Ooh. Look at all the books. This be a library, maybe?"

Screw the books – I needed to hustle Valen somewhere quiet and get a good look at the damage the golem had done. "Fine. I like libraries. Libraries are quiet." Until I showed up, anyway. Also, I actually kind of hated libraries. As far as I was concerned, libraries were where fun went to die. "Let's go in." I took a cautious step towards Valen. "You need a hand?"

The tiefling shook his head sharply. "I can walk," he growled, as if my question had offended him, and followed me inside.

The room did look kind of like a library. I took in the details in a hurry – shelves, a podium of some kind, lots of open floor. Nothing moving or trying to attack, anyway. "Take a look around, Deeks," I said. That would keep him busy and out of our hair. The red in Valen's eyes spoke of…something, I didn't know what, but it wasn't anything I wanted near Deekin right then. "See if you can find anything useful." I laid a hand on Valen's armored back. "Sit down and let's take a look at you."

Valen nodded shortly and sank down against the nearest wall. I crouched in front of him, opening my mouth to speak. Then I froze. Footsteps went by on the other side of the door. They were heavy and scraping. Stone, probably. They didn't pause. When I realized that, I breathed out a sigh of relief. "Well, at least it sounds like we're safe in here. For now."

Valen nodded. "They must be operating on orders to patrol the halls, but they have no orders telling them to come in here," he said. His breath hissed a little as he shifted. "That is the advantage of dealing with golems." He stopped to take a breath. "Find the bounds of their instructions, and you can sometimes avoid a fight entirely."

I eyed at him, frowning. I didn't like that pained expression he was wearing. "You don't look so great."

Valen shrugged. He studied the rotting carpet. "I am fine. It is only cracked."

I didn't even _need_ to be a healer to diagnose this problem: it was a near-fatal case of testosterone poisoning. "How do you know it's not broken and jabbing into a lung?" I demanded.

"Because I know what that feels like, and this is not it," the man retorted, an irritated edge to his voice.

An irritated edge came to my voice. "And if you're wrong, I'm the one who gets to carry your heavy-ass carcass to the Seer and tell her I got you killed." His armor hid a lot of the details, but from his height and the way he swung that flail, he was a good six feet and two hundred pounds of pure muscle if he was an ounce. I doubted I _could_ carry him. I wasn't even sure if I could drag him. "So, why don't you humor me and let me take a look?"

Valen glowered at the floor for a few moments longer. Then, with a clearly reluctant tightening of his lips, he nodded.

I didn't dare hesitate, just in case he changed his mind. I blinked into my second sight.

Then my breath left my lungs as if I'd been punched in the stomach.

Everywhere I looked, I saw scar tissue – long slashes where Valen's skin had been cut by a sword or an axe, puckered irregular circles where something sharp and pointed had been driven into him, jagged marks where teeth or claws had torn him open, rough tracks where his skin had been scraped off by some hellish terrain, deep scars in his bones where they'd been broken, and, worst of all, knotted, criss-crossing lines all over his back that looked like the marks of a whip.

There were so many scars, so many old breaks in his ribs alone, that I almost couldn't see the fresh cracks. It was as if, in the litany of Valen's pain, this latest injury was just a footnote. "Oh, my god," I blurted. "What happened to you? You're a wreck." Then I heard my own words and cringed. "Shit. I'm sorry," I stammered. "I shouldn't have said that. That was stupid of me."

The tiefling shrugged, his eyes avoiding mine. "Do not be sorry." His voice was as close to defeated as I'd ever heard it. "You are right. I am a wreck."

When would I learn that it was easier to talk without my foot in my mouth? "No, you're not," I tried to backpedal. "You're just…" It hurt just to look at him. "Is that all from…" I couldn't say it.

Valen's mouth twisted. "Most of it," he said, apparently grasping what it was I couldn't say. "I survived many battles in the Abyss, but I did not come out of all of them unscathed. I was given healing afterwards, but…demonic healing is not pleasant, to say the least, and the results are…not pretty." He tilted his head. Some of his hair had come loose from his ponytail, and now it fell across his face, obscuring his expression. "It is of no concern," he added dismissively. "To be honest, I do not even remember getting most of them." He shrugged. "Perhaps that is for the best. Some memories should be forgotten."

Suddenly, so suddenly they even took me by surprise, tears filled my eyes. He didn't deserve this. No one did, but whatever his faults, Valen was basically a decent man, and it wasn't _right_ that someone had taken this decent man and hurt him until he was so scarred in body and mind that he couldn't even remember where all of his scars came from.

The sound of footsteps plodding by outside shook me out of my daze. Luckily, they didn't slow, much less stop. I drew in a steadying breath and groped in my potions pouch for one of my less potent healing potions. Valen's injury wasn't immediately life threatening, but he was in danger of puncturing a lung, not to mention in pain. Maybe he was used to hurting, but as long as I was around, he was going to have to get used to the idea of pain relief, for a change. "Take this," I said, holding the vial out to him. "It won't work instantly, but it should have you back together in a few minutes." I flushed. "I'd do it myself, but I never got the knack of healing." Outside, I managed to keep some composure, but inside, I cringed. I really was useless for anything except wrecking shit. "Sorry."

Valen took the vial obediently enough and downed it without objection. He grimaced at the taste. "Those never taste good," he said, handing the vial back.

I took the vial and tucked it into my pouch. "You should taste mine," I said. I swept my feet sideways, going from kneeling to sitting back against the bookshelf. I watched Valen from the corner of my eye, waiting for some sign that the potion was taking. "I make them with fenberries and honey," I went on. "They're great. Learned the recipe from a druid up in the Nether Mountains."

Valen gave me a speculative look. "So," he said, taking short, shallow breaths. "Let me see if I understand. You are…a wandering herbalist who accidentally destroys cities and feeds pies to dragons, is that right?"

I shrugged. "Not really. It's not like the city destroying and dragon feeding parts are a habit," I said. "Besides, herbalism can be a lot more dangerous than you'd think."

The tiefling cocked his head. "How so?"

"Well, for one, you get people asking you to treat all kinds of weird ailments."

Valen quirked an eyebrow at me. "Do I want to know where this is heading?"

I grinned. "Sure, why not?" I said. I could hear Deekin rummaging around and talking to himself, but otherwise, the place was quiet. "We have time for a quick story." Plus, the healing potion and the distraction seemed to be doing Valen some good. His eyes were blue again, and that pained expression was mostly gone from his face. I cast my mind back. "There was this one time when I traveled with a Gur caravan over the Stormhorns-"

Valen blinked. "What are the Stormhorns?"

I felt an odd little flicker of pride. For once, I knew more about this world than someone else. "They're a mountain range on the west side of Cormyr, south of the Anauroch desert, about…" I pictured the map in my head and waved vaguely. "About eight hundred miles southeast of Waterdeep, give or take."

The tiefling's expression was embarrassed. "I…have not had much of a chance to explore this world. I am afraid that I know nothing about most of these places."

A distant memory surfaced, of Drogan taking me into his study and unrolling a huge old map for me. It had been the first time I'd gotten a good idea of what my strange new world looked like. "Deekin said he found a map of the surface in the temple library," I mused. "If we make it back alive, remind me to show you all of those places on the map."

Valen's expression turned thoughtful. "If we do make it back alive, I think I would like that," he said quietly. "Thank you."

I sat up a little straighter. "You're welcome." I ran a hand through my hair. It had already started to settle. "Anyway, where was I?"

"Traveling with a Gur caravan and about to explain to me what is so dangerous about herbalism."

"Right. If you don't know the Gur, they're nomads who travel all over the world in wagons and make a living as musicians, coppersmiths, and sellers of sundries. They've got a reputation as thieves, but it's mostly made up. They're nice people, and amazing cooks." I marshaled my thoughts. "At any rate, I'd treated a few of them for some minor stuff when I joined up, and word got around, so one night, when we were just sitting down to eat, the headman – that's the caravan leader – comes up to me, stops right in front of my face, grins real big, drops his pants, and says," I lowered my voice to its deepest register and mimicked the rolling Gur accent. "Ha-ha! What do you say about _this_ , Windwalker?"

Valen snickered, even as his face reddened a little. "What _did_ you say about that?"

"Not much, to tell you the truth. I had a mouth full of soup at the time and it was all I could do not to spit it all over him."

Valen's voice was dry. "From the sounds of it, that would have been the least of his problems."

I laughed and looked at Valen from the corner of my eye. "You must be feeling better, if you can crack jokes."

Valen stretched experimentally, rolling his shoulders and flexing his arms and hands as if testing his range of motion. Leather creaked under various strains, and the buckles over his biceps, the ones that held his arm guards in place, pulled temporarily taut. "I believe so."

I nodded. "Good. Because this is about as long as I can sit still." I jumped to my feet, my nerves seized by a sudden case of the jitters. "Deeks? How are we doing? Are you finding anything interesting?"

The kobold's voice floated back, buoyed by doubt. "Maybe. You wanna come take a look at this?"

I jingled my fluorspar stone in my pocket. "Sure." I strode into the middle of the room, scanning for the bard's familiar shape, like a short, arthritic scarecrow with scales. I sighted him near some kind of weird metal podium and moseyed on over. "Whatcha lookin' at, Deeks?"

The kobold was crouched over a spread-out array of books and papers. He was flipping through a tattered old notebook, his snout all scrunched up in concentration. "Deekin thinks he found the Maker's notes," he said. "Only they be half in duergar and half in Common and the handwriting be awful, but…" He tapped the book with one claw, then shifted his attention to his own journal, its pages covered in a messy scrawl that nevertheless managed to fill every available square inch of space. "Maybe there be something. You remember how the golems talked, Boss?"

I frowned. "Uh. I don't know. They made noises. Was that talking?"

Deekin lifted his head, stared into the distance, and sighed. "Yeah, Boss. Trust Deekin. He knows talking. Those golems said something over and over, and it be the same thing every time, so it must be talking, right? Or words, anyway."

For all I knew, they could have been barking like dogs, but whatever. "I'll buy it. What are they saying?"

Skinny fingers scrabbled through more pages, then stopped at one page and splayed out, holding the book flat. "Numbers," Deekin said. His black eyes scanned the pages, intent. "The Maker got a list here. He made up words to command the golems, just so's he not say them by accident, and he got the lexicon right here." The kobold looked up, saw my face, sighed again, and added, "A golem-to-Common dictionary, Boss."

"Oh." I crouched down a safe distance away from the little bard's papers. They weren't exactly neat, but I thought they'd be even messier with boot prints on them. "So, uh. Why are the golems saying numbers?"

Deekin scratched the side of his snout. "From what Deekin be reading here, the numbers is like…names, almost."

Valen stepped forward, a thoughtful frown on his face. "Names as numbers?" he asked. Then his face cleared. "Oh. You mean identification numbers?"

I went still for a long second. _All right. That was freaky._ I'd never heard such an…Earth-like term out of anyone in this world. I turned to him. It took a couple of tries before I could speak, and both times I almost thought better of it. "You…know what ID numbers are?"

Valen looked at me as if I'd asked him if he was familiar with his own left elbow. "Yes, of course. There are creatures of the Planes that identify themselves only by their numbers. Modrons, for instance." He studied my face, got a resigned look on his, and added, "Mechanical beings from a place of pure order."

Deekin's head bobbed excitedly. "Ooh! Deekin thinks you got it, goat-man. The numbers is names! It be the only explanation." He hopped onto his feet and went over to the metal podium, wrapping his fingers around the edges of it and pulling himself to peer at what was on them. "And from the sounds of it, the Maker be able to do things to the golems using this thing here, only he not exactly leave detailed instructions, and what Deekin can find makes no sense." He pointed. "See, there be some kind of summoning circle in front of it, but Deekin can't figure out what it summons, or how."

I stood and walked over to the podium. An eerie sense of familiarity washed over me, like I was seeing something I knew but in entirely the wrong place. The surface of the podium was covered in buttons and switches and dials. "Where did this Maker come from?" I asked slowly.

Deekin gave me a sharp look. "Here, Boss." If I hadn't been listening for it, I probably wouldn't have caught the particular emphasis the bard put on the word 'here'. "Probably, anyway. Why?"

I braced my hands on the podium, and for a second, the eerie familiarity became so overwhelming that my head spun. Instead of papers or a prompter, though, this podium had what looked like a control panel on it. There was one switch in particular that stood off to one side, all by itself. It was a big metal toggle. I reached for it. "I think this is the on switch," I said, and flicked it.

The switch moved from one position to the other with a solid _clonk_ , the podium began to hum faintly, and a blinking dash appeared in the air above it.

Deekin jumped back. So, I noticed, did Valen, his flail rattling as if he was ready to hit the thing. I looked up, squinting. "Huh," I said. "I think it's waiting for a command."

Deekin crept back cautiously. "Er." He eyed the blinking dash. "Like, we say the magic words, and it does stuff?"

I frowned. I'd never been good with technology, but as a child of a world that depended on it, maybe I couldn't help but develop a certain intuition, and if this wasn't a machine, it was a magical artifact that acted a whole hell of a lot like one. "No. Not exactly. You have to use the buttons." I nodded at the keys. "Can you tell what these symbols mean, Deeks?

The kobold grabbed the Maker's notebooks and strained to stand up on tiptoe to see the podium's controls, but he still couldn't reach. "Show me?" he asked.

I reached down, grabbed him under the arms, and hoisted him up. "Better now?"

"Yeah. Just hold on a sec." Still in my grasp, the bard started flipping through the Maker's notes. "Umm. Deekin thinks maybe this one-" One sharp little talon pointed to a key with a squiggle on it. "-means 'routine maintenance'." He looked up. "What that mean?"

I shrugged and set the little kobold down. "Let's push it and find out," I said, and pressed the button.

Nothing happened. At least, nothing happened except for Deekin yelping like a kicked shih tzu. "You crazy, Boss?" he cried.

I frowned at the podium. "Maybe we've got to tell it what to do maintenance on, first," I murmured. Suddenly, I started snapping my fingers. "Oh. Oh! Did you catch what the scavenger golem was saying?"

Deekin blinked, then started nodding. "Yeah." He scuttled over to his notes. " _Sin thesti, sin thesti, sin thesti_ …." The kobold flipped through the Maker's manual. "No, wait. That not be quite right. Hmm. Hold on."

A voice by my side made me jump. "How do you know how to use this?" Valen asked. He'd been watching and listening so quietly I'd almost forgotten he was there. "I thought you had no aptitude for magic."

 _This isn't magic,_ I thought, or if it was, it was a kind of magic so concrete and technical that it wrapped right back around to the way we'd done things back in my old world.

A tinny buzz in my head turned into a voice. _Oh, just tell him,_ Enserric griped. _What harm can it do?_

I put the sword down firmly. _No_. Some secrets just didn't need telling. "It just makes sense," I said out loud, a little lamely. I ran my hand over the control panel. "Deeks? What's the scavenger golem's number?"

The kobold jumped up, waving the Maker's manual. " _Sinth thesti_ ," he shouted. "That be it. It's five-four, Boss."

"What, like fifty-four?"

Deekin nodded vigorously. "Just like that."

There were two big dials at the top of the podium. "Okay. Let me try something," I said, and turned the left dial clockwise until it clicked. The dash in the air changed to a blocky number. It read '1'. I stared at it. Then I laughed. "I don't believe it." I placed my hands over the dials. "Fifty-four, you said?" At the kobold's confirmation, I started clicking through numbers. The first digit went up to two, then three, and up to five. The right dial made a blinking '1' appear next to the '5'. I clicked through the dial's positions until the readout said '54'. "Okay," I said. "How about we try that again?" Then I pressed the button labeled 'routine maintenance'.

The numbers flickered, and then a Frankenstein monster of assorted parts appeared in the summoning circle in front of the podium. It tried to walk away, bumped into an invisible wall, and then stopped. " _Sinth thesti_ ," it said, the syllables recognizable now that I had some clue what to listen for. Then it slumped, and the lights of its eyes dimmed, almost as if it had gone into standby.

I grinned. "Okay, Deeks. Find the words for, 'Make the scavenger golem stop working.', please."

Paper fluttered past frantic scaly fingers. "On it," Deekin said. "Just a sec." He paused, and looked up. "Hey, Boss? What 'decommission' mean?"

"What's the symbol look like?" I asked. The kobold flipped the notebook around and pointed at a symbol on the page. I searched the keys until I found something that seemed to match the symbol. "All right. Let's see what happens." The button went down with a solid-sounding click.

The summoning circle blinked twice. Then, without ceremony or even a noise, the scavenger golem fell to pieces.

Deekin lowered the notebook and peeked around the podium. "Hey. Neat. I think we did it."

I grinned. "Good job, everybody," I said. Suddenly seized by some old-world nostalgia, I leaned down and held up my right hand. "Gimme five, Deeks."

"I only gots the four fingers, Boss."

"Okay, then I'll give you five and you give me four." Our palms slapped together. I turned and held my hand out. "Slip me some skin, Valen."

The tiefling jumped as if I'd goosed him. "What?"

I looked at him, perplexed. He'd just gone beet red, for some unfathomable reason. "Give me a high five," I explained. Then, because he was still staring at me, I resorted to clearer instructions. "Hold up your right hand." Cautiously, Valen obliged. I slapped my palm lightly to his. "There. That's a high-five."

Valen stared at me for a moment longer, then looked at his hand as if he thought I might have planted something nasty in it. "Very well," he said evenly. Probably coincidentally, his tail described a question-mark like coil in the air behind him. "But what does it actually _mean_?"

I shrugged. "It's kind of a…way of celebrating a victory."

Valen frowned thoughtfully. "What a strange custom. Where does it come from?"

Enserric twitched. His voice grumbled in my head. _This is absurd. Just tell him, would you?_

I put a hand on the sword's hilt, stilling it. _No._ "Just something I picked up," I said lightly, and turned my attention back to the podium, rubbing my hands together. "All right, gentlemen. Pick a number, any number."

A lot of numbers did nothing. Thirty-seven got us a minotaur golem. Forty got us a duergar corpse, for reasons even Deekin couldn't divine. Thirteen got us an iron golem, and it was really satisfying to see that one fall to pieces when I hit the 'decommission' button.

"Thirty-three," Valen spoke up.

I raised my eyebrows at him. "Why thirty-three?"

Valen shrugged. "Rule of Three." He gave me a tight-lipped, inscrutable little smile. "Just try it."

I gave in and did as he said.

A lopsided demon-shape appeared in the summoning circle. At least, it was red like a demon, and it had batlike wings and horns and teeth like a demon, but its body was a patchwork of stitched-together parts, and when it looked at us, it had one red eye and one yellow, though both burned like fire.

Then the demon-thing spoke. "What is the meaning of this?" it growled.


	31. Midas

_A/N: HO. HO. HO. (Pratchett readers will probably get that one. Merry Christmas to readers who celebrate it, and to all others, a happy whatever-you'd-like-to-be-happy!)_

* * *

 _"No, I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing."_

\- Oscar Wilde, _Lord Arthur Savile's Crime_

~*~  
Chapter 31: Midas  
~*~

Valen blinked. "By the Lady. I cannot believe that actually worked."

I stared at the demon-thing in the circle, my hand hovering over the Maker's 'delete' button. "Who the hell are you?" I exclaimed.

The demon-thing stared back. "I might ask the same of you," it said. It sounded surprisingly intelligent for a creature that looked like it had been stitched together from the contents of Hell's spare parts bin. "You use the tools of the Maker, but you are not he." It looked around speculatively. "At first, I thought this was the work of the heretic, Ferron, but I see that he is not here. Who are you, and what is your purpose?"

I exchanged glances with Valen and Deekin. Then I shrugged. The thing was talking and not making any threatening motions. I didn't see why I shouldn't talk back. "I'm Rebecca, this short guy here is Deekin, the tall one is Valen," I said. "And we're looking for…friends." Quickly, I spun him the highlight reel of the war between the Valsharess and…well, everybody, really, because if there was anybody in Faerun she hadn't tried to conquer it was only because she hadn't gotten around to them yet. "We were hoping to find help here," I finished. "What happened to the Maker? Is he still here?"

The demon-thing stared at me with its mismatched eyes. "The Maker is here and not here," it answered. "He left us close to five hundred years ago, retreating to the depths of the dungeon." It spread its uneven wings and bent in a slight bow. "I am Aghaaz, high priest of the Maker and the leader of the sentient golems who live on this island. He has anointed me his high priest, to deliver his word and carry out his will until he returns."

Valen was studying Aghaaz with a mix of disgust and fascination. "So the legends are true. The Maker did succeed in creating intelligent constructs."

Aghaaz drew himself up proudly. He had four horns on his head, two bone-white and two black and all four of slightly different sizes, like a broken crown. "We are the children of Alsigard the Maker, who gave us the gift of life itself," he said proudly. "He came here to escape his flawed brethren and find solitude in which to create the perfect being – a creature worthy of dwelling in the Maker's presence."

Deekin eyed the golem critically. "You don't look so perfect to Deekin. Deekin thinks maybe the Maker didn't see so good?"

The golem looked down at the kobold, his eyes widening and then narrowing. Then he smiled. "Your words do not offend me. The Maker is perfect. We are merely a shadow of his perfection. But by serving his will, we can bring ourselves closer to him."

Servility wasn't a good look on him, although really, nothing would've looked good on this guy. "And what _is_ the Maker's will?" I asked.

"He commanded us to guard this place from those who would destroy his work and loot the remains of our fallen siblings," Aghaaz answered. It was hard to read his expression through all the stitches, but his gaze seemed speculative, even calculating. "But it seems that you are not like the thieves who have come before. You come seeking help, you say? Perhaps we can be of service to each other."

It had taken my species a few million years to go from flinging our poop at each other to taking pictures of it and showing the pictures to all of our friends. It had taken these guys five hundred years to go from mindless to conniving. That _had_ to be some kind of record. "I'm listening," I said. I was making no promises, but it cost us nothing to hear him out. "What's your proposal?"

Aghaaz straightened, or at least got both of his shoulders to roughly the same height. "You may help me against my enemies, and I will help you against yours. You find the Maker's children in the midst of a war. A heretic has risen from among our ranks, claiming that we owe the Maker nothing and are free to leave this place and do as we please."

I shrugged. "So what? If they want to leave, why don't they just leave?"

The demon-golem's frown said he hadn't liked my answer. "That is not the Maker's will. His will is for us to remain here and guard his work."

Valen leveled a skeptical and distinctly unfriendly stare at Aghaaz. "With you in charge, I suppose?" he said, in that quietly ominous way of his that said he was only speaking softly because he was saving his energy in case he had to beat the snot out of whomever he was talking to.

Aghaaz stiffened. "It is a duty I fulfill not for my own sake, but for the sake of my creator and my people," he replied, his voice grating. "A duty which has lately become more difficult due to heresy and rebellion within our ranks."

I thought back. "This the Ferron person you were talking about?"

The golem's eyes narrowed. "Yes. Ferron's words have disrupted our peace and order. He has turned many of the Maker's children against _me_ , the rightful ruler in the Maker's absence, and brought violence to these halls. This war has turned golem against golem. We are destroying the Maker's work. It must be stopped." He turned to me. "Eliminate this heretic for me, end this war, and I will send my people to help you in your war."

"Ummm." We all turned at the sound of Deekin's reedy voice. The kobold was staring keenly at Aghaaz. "That not make much sense. You say you not want golems to get broken any more, but if you send golems to fight, golems might get broken."

Aghaaz turned his misshapen head towards the kobold. "If this war does not end, all of the Maker's children will die. Though it burdens me to make such a choice, to save the many, I must sacrifice the few." He turned back to me. "Bring me the heretic Ferron's head," he instructed. "He dwells one floor below, in the eastern wing, guarded by the fearful and the deluded. No doubt he will seek to sway you with his words. Do not allow it. He is dangerous, and must be stopped."

I saw Valen open his mouth. His blue eyes were winter skies and his face was stormy, both of which I took as signs that he was about to unleash a heaping helping of redheadedness on Aghaaz. Behind the podium, I made a frantic shushing motion. Valen's eyes flicked downwards, then back up. Frowning, he closed his mouth again. "An interesting proposal. We'll discuss it," I told Aghaaz. "How do we send you back, and how can we reach you once we've made a decision?"

The demon-golem bowed. "I, also, dwell one floor below, in the western wing. I will instruct my people to leave you unharmed and to bring you to me when you are ready." He wrapped his crooked wings around himself. "To release me, press 'end maintenance'." He looked at my blank expression and sighed. "The red button. Next to the one you pushed to bring me here."

I looked down. "Oh. Heh. There it is. The big red one. Right in front of me." I cleared my throat, made like the past five seconds hadn't happened, and pushed the button. Aghaaz vanished. "Wow," I said, once I was sure he was gone. "That's handy. I hope we didn't just teleport him into lava or something, though."

Valen grimaced and ran a hand through his blood-red hair. "He is made of tanar'ri flesh," he muttered. "Lava will not be an issue for him." He looked at me, a little accusingly. "Why did you stop me from speaking?"

I resisted the urge to snatch the Maker's manual out of Deekin's hands and bash the tiefling in the head with it, right between the horns."You looked like you were about to tell Aghaaz to shove it," I explained. "First lesson from Bill Blumenthal's school of negotiation: never shut the door on a deal unless you absolutely have to. If nothing else, as long as you've still got 'em talking, there's a chance you'll learn something that could be useful if you have to fight 'em later on."

Valen tilted his head questioningly. "Bill?"

I sighed. "William." He'd been dead for probably about four years now and it still hurt to talk about him. "My father."

The tiefling looked at my face. "I see," he said gently. "It sounds like he was a very wise man."

"Yeah," I said tonelessly. "The apple fell pretty far from the tree, there." I turned away before he could answer. "I think we should talk to this Ferron guy, first," I went on. "Aghaaz painted himself as the good guy and Ferron as the bad guy, but something about his story doesn't jibe." Two incomprehending faces, one pale and one scaled, told me that I'd just slipped into Earth slang again. "Sorry. What I meant is, it doesn't all match up." I knew fuck-all about golems, but the minute they started talking and thinking like people, I started to feel like I was swimming in familiar waters again. Golems were a mystery to me, but people were people, even if they were built instead of born.

Valen was looking at me sidelong, speculative. "Aghaaz's words gave me a very strong sense that the Maker's will and his will often…conveniently coincide, shall we say."

"Yeah," Deekin piped up. "And don't it be amazing how it be the Maker's will that Aghaaz be in charge of everything? Kinda makes you think."

"Yes," I said. "And usually, when religious people start talking about heretics, they mean 'somebody who isn't doing what I told them to do'." I met Deekin's beady black eyes, then shifted my gaze to meet Valen's baby blues. "Wow. We're a bunch of hardened cynics, aren't we?"

Valen shrugged. "I usually find it simplest to assume the worst."

"Saves time, you're saying?"

The tiefling's lips curved into a sardonic half-smile. "Precisely."

* * *

"Aghaaz will not allow us to leave," Ferron said.

Valen leaned over and murmured in my ear. His breath tickled the side of my neck, raising goosebumps. "What was I saying about assuming the worst?"

"You don't have to say it again, I was agreeing with you," I muttered back. I raised my voice. "How's he keeping you here?" I asked Ferron. "And why?"

The golem's sigh was the sharp sound of steam escaping a vent. He was tall and gleaming, a humanoid form made of solid gold. I was pretty sure I'd seen some actors carrying miniature versions of him around at award ceremonies. "He has barred our way to the Power Source, which lies below with the Maker," the golden golem said in his hollow, robotic voice. "The Power Source is an ancient artifact created by the Maker. It is what gives us life and self-awareness. Without it, we would be as mindless as our brethren above. As long as Aghaaz prevents us from taking it, we cannot leave. And as long as we remain here, he will continue to attack us." The golden golem's face shifted into a grimace, amazingly mobile despite being made of seemingly solid metal. "As for why he is doing this, he wishes to rule and will not brook dissent."

I looked around. There were other golems gathered in the room with us. Most were made of metal, like Ferron. A few were made of demon-flesh, like Aghaaz. Ferron's heresy had found willing ears – or at least hearing organs of _some_ kind – in many of Alsigard's children. "What do you want, Ferron?" I asked.

"To be free," the golem answered at once. A strange, wistful note entered his voice. "The Maker is gone. Whether he left us or died leads me to equivalent conclusions. If he abandoned us, then we have no further obligation to him. If he is dead, then his will is dead as well, and holds no sway over us. Either way, I owe Alsigard nothing. He was no god, merely a powerful wizard who wished to create the perfect being." Ferron held out his hands, the gold that made him shifting weirdly to accommodate the movement. "He failed, I think. We are sentient, but we still think like constructs. We have remained here for hundreds of years, and it was only recently that we were able to comprehend the possibility of leaving the place of our creation. I believe that if we remain here, we will never be able to truly understand what it is to be free." He lowered his hands. "That is why we wish to leave this island. We wish to cast off the chains of our creation and become more than what we are now."

Valen was listening, his blue eyes intent. He stood with his back to the wall, the golems kept carefully in his field of view and his hand resting on his flail, just in case somebody decided to try something. "And what will you do with your newfound freedom?"

Ferron appeared to contemplate that question with a kind of dutiful gravity. "Seek. Think. Learn. Grow."

Valen eyed the golem dubiously. "All admirable goals, if true."

Ferron sounded nonplussed. "They are true. We have no ambition but to better ourselves."

"Strange." The tilt of Valen's eyebrow was decidedly skeptical. "I once heard the same thing said by a kocrachon, in regards to its art."

The golem pondered that. "I do not know this creature," he admitted. "Query. What is a kocrachon, and what is its art?"

Valen's voice was flat. "It is a baatezu torturer, and its art is pain."

Ferron frowned. "I do not condone the causing of pain."

"Then that is the difference between us, because I do." Valen's face was as forbidding as a fortress wall. "You are sentient. Thus, you must be able to feel pain. Very well. I strive to be a good man, but if my allies suffer from your actions, so will you."

Ferron looked at Valen, then inclined his head. "That is…equitable."

I chewed on my lower lip, only half-listening. How the hell had I landed in the middle of a golem war? More to the point, how could I get out of here with some golems on my side, preferably without anybody getting hurt? "Can't Aghaaz be reasoned with?"

Ferron's voice was tired. "I have tried. He will not listen."

"Why not show him the Maker's body?" I suggested. "Or show it to his followers. Then they'll know the Maker's no god."

"Aghaaz has prevented us from entering the Maker's sanctum," Ferron answered. "Moreover, it is guarded by many traps. I once tried to defeat them. I failed. I nearly perished. Together, perhaps, my siblings and I would be able to break through, but fractured as we are, we stand little chance." He shrugged. "In any case, I do not see how the Maker's death changes anything. We are sentient beings. We are not slaves. Living or dead, the instant the Maker gave us free will, he ceased to own us."

Deekin cleared his throat. "Um." He raised his quill. "'Scuse me. Deekin gots a question."

Ferron looked down. "Yes, small…" He paused. "…creature?"

"Deekin be a kobold, in case you not know, but that not really relevant," the little lizard chirped. "No, what Deekin wants to know is, what happens to Aghaaz if you takes the Power Source and goes away?"

Ferron sighed. "The same thing that would happen to us if we attempted to leave without it, I imagine. He would become an unthinking construct."

The kobold wrote that down. "Sooo…doesn't that mean you basically want us to kill him?"

I drew in a sharp breath. I hadn't even thought of that. "Ferron? Is that true?"

The golden golem looked down briefly. "I do not desire my brother's death, but yes, it is true that he will die without the Power Source," he admitted. It was next to impossible to read his face – the reflections alone from his polished golden skin confounded the eye – but something in his voice sounded sad. Then it firmed. "But if Aghaaz wishes to deny us all our freedom so that he may rule over us unopposed, that is his choice. I am not willing to remain here for another five hundred years, chained to another's will. Many others feel the same. Aghaaz is more than welcome to join us, as an equal among equals." His voice became heavy. "I would sacrifice much for my brother's sake, but I will not sacrifice my freedom to his ambition. If that means leaving him to die, so be it."

Valen shifted. His armor clinked. "Are you willing to aid us, once you are free?"

Ferron hesitated. "I myself am, but I must discuss your proposal with my siblings," he said gravely. "I am not willing to commit them to a course of action which they have not chosen for themselves." He studied the tiefling with his glowing eyes. "However, I will do my best to persuade them. To enslave others is to deny them the right to exercise their free will. If this is what the Valsharess proposes to do, then I believe it is our duty as sentient beings to oppose her."

Valen put his head to one side, considering. "Understood," he acknowledged curtly. He caught my eyes and jerked his head, beckoning me away. "Shall we have a discussion of our own?"

I nodded. Our three-person posse withdrew to the next room, while Ferron collected his own people and went into a huddle. "What do you guys think?" I asked quietly, when I thought we were out of hearing range.

The tiefling's pale face was pensive. "I think that I am reluctant to embroil myself in yet another war, but at the same time, I find myself feeling sorry for these golems," he confessed. "To be trapped here for centuries, slaves to a dead man and to their own natures…that cannot be pleasant."

I felt my tense expression soften. "Yeah," I agreed. "I sympathize." I hesitated.

Valen arched an eyebrow. "But?"

 _Shaundakul save me from overly perceptive redheads_. "But neither of them is innocent here. Aghaaz might be a tyrant who's willing to kill everyone who won't obey him, but Ferron's willing to leave anyone who disagrees with him behind to die."

The tiefling gave me a slight nod. "True." He frowned thoughtfully. "Although perhaps giving Ferron the Power Source may bring Aghaaz to the bargaining table and allow us to resolve this peacefully."

"It'll give Ferron some leverage to negotiate a truce, you're saying?" At Valen's nod, I heaved a sigh. "I hope so, but I don't see Aghaaz giving up so easily. He seemed pretty pissed off." As if it might hold the answers, I looked up at the ceiling. It was dusty, featureless stone, just like everything else. What this place needed was a good airing – somebody to throw open the windows and let the wind to come in and sweep out all the cobwebs, maybe shake things up a little. The ceiling went out of focus as an idea hit me. It was a crazy idea, but hey, it was a crazy situation. "What if we showed all the golems the truth and let them decide what to do with it?" I asked. I looked down to meet Valen's eyes. "What if we found the Maker?"

Valen tilted his head. "Found his body, you mean?" The tip of his tail tapped pensively against his shin, a gesture reminiscent of drumming fingers, only way weirder due to the appendage involved. "You know, that may even work. Though I hope you are aware that such a revelation would be a direct challenge to Aghaaz's authority. I doubt he will take such a challenge kindly."

I shrugged. "Good. People in authority should be challenged. Keeps 'em on their toes."

Valen's voice was wry. "Spoken like a true maverick."

I scowled uncertainly at him, unable to tell if he was complimenting me or making fun of me. "What's the problem here? If he's lying about the Maker in order to control his people, would you be okay with letting him get away with it?"

Valen helds up his hands. "Peace, Windwalker. I am not arguing with you. I am merely saying that if we plan to challenge Aghaaz's authority, we should be prepared for a fight. He will not let go of his position easily." His expression turned thoughtful. "Though I do look forward to seeing how these golems respond when they discover the truth of their Maker. Will it make them cling to their beliefs all the harder, or will the first exercise of their free will be a conversion to atheism?"

"I don't know, but I'm sure the doubt'll be good for 'em," I said. "Doubt keeps you young." I paused. "Although I guess that's not a problem for a golem."

Valen cocked his head. "You are unusually skeptical for a woman of faith."

I shrugged. "I'm not actually all that religious." I'd never been able to bring myself to believe in the god of my childhood. Blind faith in a distant, unknowable god wasn't something I was capable of. I'd needed something more concrete, more personal, and you couldn't get much more personal than a god who materialized at your bedside at three in the morning and woke you up by whistling ancient Cormyrean folk tunes and playing cat's cradle with your boot laces until you threw the other boot at him to make him go away. The old man had done that to Baz, once. Baz's sentiments on that particular divine apparition had been memorable, not to mention unrepeatable. "But Shaundakul's an unusual god, so I made an exception for him."

Valen looked at me sharply. "I see." He paused, seeming to struggle over his next words. "Might I ask you a personal question?"

"You can ask me anything you want." I smiled. "Whether or not I'll answer is another matter."

The tiefling looked startled, then smiled briefly. "Fair enough. Every woman must have her secrets, I suppose."

"Eight and a half," I said, deadpan. "Nine, if they're narrow in the toe." I intercepted the confused look Valen shot me, and I laughed. "Sorry. Guess that wasn't the kind of secret you meant." I straightened my face and gestured. "Go ahead. Ask your question." I felt my smile come back. "I'll decide whether to answer once I've heard it."

Valen looked at me for a moment, an odd expression on his face. "Sometimes, Windwalker, you are as unpredictable as a lightning strike." He shook his head. "But I digress. Here is my question. Why did an unbeliever become a priestess?"

Nobody had ever actually asked me that question. I had to stop and think about it for a minute. "Because Shaundakul earned my trust," I answered at last. It had taken a while, just like it had with Baz and Kelavir, but just like with them, I'd come around eventually, just as Shaundakul had known we would. The wily old bastard had had us all pegged. "And because it…feels natural, I guess," I went on thoughtfully. "Most of what he asks me to do is stuff I'd want to do anyway. He just makes it easier." And he loved me, comforted me, made me laugh, challenged me, kept faith with me, and he asked for a lot but demanded nothing, which made me want to give him everything – including, when he cited free will as a reason not to give me a straight answer to anything, a punch in the nose.

"I see." Valen's frown was contemplative. "I mean no offense, and I am…glad that you have found a calling which suits you so well, but I cannot imagine putting so much trust in another being, myself." He touched one of his horns and shrugged, a little self-consciously. "As a planar, I think my perspective is a bit different from that of the people in your world. I have seen powerful beings fall and die in the Abyss. I have heard of the god-corpses floating in the Astral Plane, though I have never seen them myself. I know that there are some beings in the multiverse before which even gods must give way, and that even the mightiest gods are not infallible."

I shrugged. "I don't expect Shaundakul to be perfect. I just expect him to do the best he can."

Valen eyed me pensively. "That is a surprisingly reasonable argument, for a believer."

I grinned. "That's a nice thing to say, for an atheist."

Valen shook his head. "I would not call myself an atheist. I do not deny the existence of the gods. I merely want nothing to do with them."

I considered that. "Not even if they offered to help you?"

The tiefling turned his head to look me right in the eyes. His expression held so many things, all of the sudden – grief, pain, and a quiet, seething anger. "If the gods wanted to help me, where were they when Grimash't took me to the Abyss?"

I returned his stare. For a long moment, I couldn't speak. The look on Valen's face made me feel like I'd been punched in the gut. Maybe I should have been. "I'm sorry," I said quietly.

His expression took on a slight cast of remorse. "Do not be." He offered a very small smile, barely a flicker, but there. "It is a sensitive subject, and perhaps I…" He frowned and looked away. "I overreact, at times. But you did nothing wrong."

I grimaced. "You mean aside from sticking my foot in my mouth?"

Valen put his head to one side, considering. "That is not necessarily a bad thing."

I blinked at him. "Why isn't it a bad thing?"

That teensy weensy smile came back. "Because as long as you have your foot in your mouth, I know that you are being honest with me."

I gave the man a flat, indignant stare. His only response was a sardonically lifted eyebrow that said, louder than words, _'Go on. Try to prove me wrong.'_ The thing was, I really couldn't. I flushed. "Very funny," I grumbled. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the little fluorspar stone and rubbed my thumb over it, trying to think of a way to change the subject. "All right. My turn to ask a question."

Valen's expression turned a little wary, and his tail went still. "Go ahead."

"What's a planar?"

The tiefling relaxed visibly. Apparently, that hadn't been too objectionable a question. "Ah. As to that…" He cleared his throat. "There are an infinite number of Planes in the multiverse. This one, the Prime, is only one of them," he explained. "A planar is someone who was not born on the Prime."

Well, that cinched it. He definitely wasn't from around here. "Which Plane were you born on?"

Valen flashed a sudden smirk. "None of them. Or all of them – depending on who you ask."

I stared at him. "What kind of an answer-"

A robotic voice interrupted me. "Human."

I wheeled towards the voice, arms flailing in irritation. Couldn't a person have a conversation around here? "What?" I snapped. I saw Ferron standing in the doorway and relaxed. "Oh, it's you." I patted my hair down. It was getting a little out of control again, probably due to all of the static in the air. "Welcome back," I said as if I hadn't just yelled at him, because if I couldn't act nice I could at least act casual. "What news?"

Ferron stared at me inscrutably. "We have arrived at a decision," he announced. "If you help us, as fellow sentient beings operating within a shared social structure and acting according to a set of common moral precepts, we feel that the correct response is to provide assistance commensurate with that which we have been given. Because your help will allow us to claim our freedom, we have deemed it appropriate to assist you in preserving your own freedom. This we have chosen of our own free will. Furthermore, if the facts as you have stated them are correct, we must conclude that the Valsharess intends to deprive all denizens of the Underdark and possibly this world of their liberty and place them under her dominion. As sentient beings which wish to live peacefully and independently within the Underdark as well as in any other environs to which our exercise of our right to free will may take us, we believe that while it is morally incorrect to take the lives of sentient beings without provocation, the aggression of a conquering army may be considered sufficient provocation. Therefore, we will oppose the Valsharess, with violence if need be, not only to ensure our own freedom but also to ensure it for our fellow sentients. This we have chosen of our own free will."

I stared at the golem, open-mouthed. "Uh. Was that a yes?"

A voice came from behind me, barely audible. "Lovely," Valen muttered. "We have just recruited two dozen ten-foot-tall Modrons with delusions of paladinhood into a drow army. What could possibly go wrong?"

A quill scratched frantically against parchment. "Wait, wait, Deekin didn't get all that. Hey, big gold man. Could you repea-"

Valen and I both yelled in unison. "NO!"

The kobold frowned. "But-"

I looked at Valen. Our eyes met for one brief moment of perfect fellow feeling, in much the same way a couple of condemned criminals might look at each other right before the gallows floor dropped. I turned back to Deekin. "Just…go from memory, Deeks. Please?"

Deekin sighed and bent back to his notes. "Oh, all right."

I turned back to Ferron. "All right!" I said brightly. "Moving on. If that was a yes…"

The golem nodded. "Yes. After reasoned discussion among sentient-"

I raised my hands in a 'please stop' gesture. "That's fine!" I said loudly, drowning his next words by volume alone. "That's great. That's all I needed to know." I paused. "Actually, no, there was one other thing-"

Ferron tilted his head. Something in the apparently solid gold which constituted his face shifted somehow, giving him an expression of polite inquiry. "Yes?"

I looked around at the assembled golems. "How do you feel about providing a little distraction?"


	32. Maker

_A/N: This may not go as you expect. See end of chapter for further notes._

* * *

 _You know, it's kinda hard just to get along today_  
 _Our subject isn't cool, but he fakes it anyway_  
 _He may not have a clue and he may not have style  
_ _But everything he lacks, well, he makes up in denial_

 _And all the girlies say  
_ _He's pretty fly for a white guy_

\- Offspring, "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)"

~*~  
Chapter 32: Maker  
~*~

The sounds of fighting receded. Deekin stopped singing, the screechy echoes of his voice fading mercifully quickly.

I watched my own hands pop back into view, then took a look around. Air moved through a vast, dark, and open space. We were standing on a platform at the foot of the stairs. Further on, a deep crevasse yawned, a thin stone walkway stretched across it like a clothesline.

I turned back to the others. "Well, that was interesting," I said brightly.

Valen appeared to my right. His scowl was a little on the feral side, his eyes had a faint red sheen, and his tail was lashing so hard it kept banging into the backs of his legs. " _Interesting_?" he repeated, wild-eyed. "Was it the amount of time they spent arguing over the meaning of the word 'feel' that was interesting? Or was it the fact that it took me about as long to explain the concept of decoy tactics to them?"

I considered him. "You seem a little upset," I observed.

The tiefling twitched. Going by his face, his dudgeon had shot past high and was heading into stratospheric. "A _little_? Hah." He snorted and shook himself. "Speaking to those golems makes me feel as if I have stepped into Regulus by way of Arcadia."

I nodded. "Okay," I said evenly. "If I told you I didn't know what those places were, what are the chances that you'd throw me into that crevasse over there?"

Valen paused, looked at me, then looked at the crevasse in question, then looked back at me. He opened his mouth as if to reply, then stopped and held up one finger. "Ask me again in a tick," he said. Then he spun on his heel and stomped away, muttering to himself.

Deekin watched the tiefling storm off. "What's the matter with goat-man, Boss?"

I drew the kobold away. "He's just a little hot under the collar. He'll cool down in a minute." As long as we left him alone and didn't get all up in his face, anyway. At least, that's what I would want if I was the one in the snit. And, in all fairness, those golems _had_ been pretty annoying. They were like a bunch of solid gold boy scouts. "Come on," I added. "Let's see what we've got ahead of us."

I remembered Valen saying that the Underdark had layers, unlike the surface world, and it looked as if he hadn't been exaggerating. We'd gone from a cavern with a river and an island, down through a ruin, and now we'd emerged into another cavern, big enough that I couldn't see the floor or the ceiling beyond this alcove.

We were standing on a platform that extended over deep, fathomless black. In front of us, a narrow bridge cut a pale band through the dark, leading to another upraised platform. Past that, a second walkway, just as narrow as the first, led to a doorway in the opposite wall of the cavern.

I stepped to the very edge of the platform. Wind toyed with my hair and whistled in the far reaches of the cavern. My heart rose like a hot air balloon. _Looks like we're in business, old man_ , I thought. The wind hummed, as if in agreement. I smiled and looked out, breathing deeply and listening to the sweet music of air in motion. I didn't know how, couldn't fathom by what strange currents and pathways the wind had gotten here, and I didn't care. It was enough that it was here.

Footsteps came up behind me. "I apologize," Valen said shortly. "My patience is uneven at the best of times, and this is not the best of times."

I turned and searched Valen's face. The firestorm in his eyes had already blown over, leaving nothing behind but clear blue skies. "The Valsharess has us all feeling anxious," I said, tacitly offering him a way to save face. I sure as hell couldn't throw any stones at him for being a little temperamental – not without bringing this glass house down on my head. "Don't sweat it."

Valen raised an eyebrow. "I am not certain what that means, but I think I can guess." He took a deep breath and nodded, as if acknowledging and accepting my offer. "Thank you."

It was nice to see him…well, not smiling, because even when he smiled he didn't really _smile-_ smile, but at least not looking like he'd just eaten some bad shellfish. "You're welcome." I tried to shift the subject to something a little lighter. "So what were those places you mentioned?"

Valen blinked. "Oh. Right." He cleared his throat. "Arcadia is one of the Outer Planes." He paused, looked at the blank expression on my face, got a pained expression on his, and elaborated. "The Outer Planes are the realms of the gods and…fundamental beliefs and philosophies, I suppose you could call them. On the Outer Planes, belief shapes reality."

I blinked. "Really? Wow, that's wild. So, if I were to believe really strongly that the oceans should be made of beer and candy should grow on trees, would I be able to create a Plane where that was true?"

The man's lips quirked into a half-smile just as a furrow appeared in his forehead, forming an expression I could only describe as 'beleaguered amusement'. "I…am afraid not. It takes the belief of innumerable souls to shape one of the Outer Planes. I do not think one person can do it – although there are factions which would disagree with that."

I sighed in mock dismay. "Aw. That's a shame. That would've been a pretty nice Plane to visit."

Valen looked at me quizzically. "You are a woman of simple pleasures, aren't you?"

 _Oh, honey, if only you knew._ Only he wouldn't, 'cause it wasn't his business and anyway I'd been on the receiving end of enough pearl-clutching in my life. I wasn't about to invite more. Carefully, I kept my face straight. "You could say that." I thought for a moment. "So, what's Arcadia's philosophy?"

Valen's voice went sour. "Arcadia is the home of self-righteous moralists who enjoy telling others how to live their lives."

For such a soft-spoken man, Valen had a talent for making his opinions clearer than if he'd hired a town crier to scream them. In the market square. Of Waterdeep. At noon. "Something tells me you don't like them."

Valen shrugged uncomfortably and touched one of his horns. It didn't seem to be a conscious gesture so much as _self_ -conscious, a nervous tic that came up whenever that whole tiefling subject did. "Those who dwell on that Plane are benevolent enough, but have little tolerance for those who do not obey their rules, and none for tieflings, especially those of tanar'ri blood."

I frowned in confusion. "Why not?"

A sudden smirk appeared on his face. "Because we are too unruly." He turned a speculative gaze on me. "Now that I think of it, I do not think Arcadia would welcome _you_ , either."

I squinted at him suspiciously. "Did you just call me unruly?"

"In all fairness, you _did_ destroy a library."

I had to defend myself. "It was only a little one."

"A small library filled with knowledge of incalculable value."

I threw my hands in the air. "You're acting like I did it for no reason!"

Valen folded his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow at me, in an _'Oh, I can't **wait** to hear this one'_ kind of way. "Fine. So why did you do it?" he asked.

I paused to consider that. "I…thought it would be fun to hit a vrock with a bookcase?" I tried.

Valen's face went suspiciously wooden. "This is hardly disproving my point."

Deekin cleared his throat. "Uh, guys?"

I ignored him in favor of glaring, a little half-heartedly, at Valen. "You're making fun of me again, aren't you?" I demanded. "Just like when I didn't know what a mane was."

Valen went even more stone-faced. "N-" He stopped, his lips quivering for a second before he got them back under control. "Yes."

I stared at him a few moments longer, then dropped my hands. I couldn't even be angry. It wasn't like he joked around that often. Telling him to stop would be like telling an oyster to cut it out with the pearl-making. "Right," I said. "Well, just so long as I know." I straightened my sleeves and fought back the impulse to argue. I lost the fight almost instantly. "Besides, what the hell's the problem here?" I erupted. "You were right there destroying the library with me!"

Valen flushed and shrugged a little. "I am a tiefling. Chaos is in my blood."

Deekin raised his voice. "Guys?"

I snorted. "Bullshit."

Valen blinked. "Bull- _what_?"

"You heard me," I scoffed. "I don't buy the tiefling excuse. You just wanted to fuck shit up and have some fun doing it – _you,_ not some demonic urge to demolish libraries." I pointed at Valen. "Admit it."

Valen looked at my finger, then at my face, then away, with an air of lofty, too-studied casualness. "Perhaps."

I grinned triumphantly. "Hah! See? I was right."

Valen's eyes flashed back to my face, wide with indignation. "I did not say you were right."

"You didn't say I _wasn't_ right."

Valen rolled his eyes. "Not saying you are not right is _not_ the same thing as saying you are r-" He stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Wait. What am I even saying?"

I shrugged. "How should I know? You're the one who started this."

"I did n-" Valen bit off his words, a look of combined befuddlement and annoyance crossing his face. "By the Mazes," he groaned. "You really _do_ belong in Pandemonium."

I laughed out loud. "What are _you_ complaining about? You're the one who called me unruly!"

Valen's voice rose in exasperation, and his face said he didn't know whether to laugh or to scream. "That is because you are!"

Deekin cupped his hands in front of his snout and shouted. " _Guys!_ "

I turned, blinking. So did Valen. "What?" I asked. "What's wrong?"

The little bard put his hands on his hips and stared at me as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. "Uh, Boss? Deekin all for a good argument, but maybe you guys could wait until we not gots golems and nasty traps to worry about? Maybe?"

He had a point. Valen had gone red. I suspected I had, too. I cleared my throat. I wasn't quite sure what had come over me, except that baiting Valen into an argument was a little too easy and a lot too fun. "Right. Sorry." I turned back to the cavern. "So, where are these nasty traps?"

The kobold studied the path ahead of us. "Deekin not gots a clue. That kind of be the problem."

I sighed. "I was afraid you were going to say that." I surveyed the path ahead. "So, what's our plan?"

Valen spoke up, deadpan. "Try not to get killed."

I stared out over the darkness. "Brilliant plan. Thanks, sunshine."

The weapon master bowed ironically. "You are welcome, my lady."

We moved out. Deekin, as before, took the lead, his steps small and careful on the narrow walkway and his sharp kobold nose and sharp kobold eyes alert for the wires and pressure plates that heralded traps.

When we were halfway across the first platform, lightning sprang into being.

I craned my neck. The lightning was suddenly running around us, forming lines of electricity like a cattle fence. "All right," I said, resigned. "Who turned on the lights?"

Deekin crouched low. "Deekin totally not see this one coming. Sorry, Boss."

The lightning encircled us on all sides, shooting out to the four corners of the platform. It was building up to something nasty. I could feel it. "Don't be sorry, just tell me how to fix it!"

Valen's hand fell on my shoulder. "Break the mirrors!" he urged. He pointed. On pedestals at the four corners of the platforms, mirrors were reflecting the light back at the lightning, feeding more power into it. "They are augmenting the spell - if you break the mirrors, that should weaken it."

I looked around, bewildered, not quite understanding, but if these two told me I should do it, then what the hell – I'd do it. I reached up into the electrical current, let it flow into my hands until my teeth were chattering and my ears were ringing, and threw the gathered power at the mirror.

There was a loud crash, and a shower of silver flashes scythed out into the dark.

Valen looked up. "It looks weaker," he said, his voice tense. "I think it is working. Get the others. Quickly."

I nodded and turned. Gathered. Flung. Another mirror shattered in a crack of ozone, then the third, and the fourth.

When the last mirror broke, the lights went out as suddenly as they'd come on.

We stood in the silence, catching our breath. "Well, that was exciting," I said, a bright edge to my voice. "Now, let's never do it again."

Valen's voice came out of the dark like the tolling of a funeral bell. "Agreed." He paused. "On both counts."

Deekin winced. "Sorry, Boss. Deekin thinks it was maybe the mirrors that activated the trap, only he not see 'em." He looked around. "This Alsigard be pretty tricksy for a dead guy."

"Yeah, and all the girlies say he's pretty fly for a white guy," I said.

Deekin blinked at me. "What?"

I sighed. This place and its eerie parallels with my old world were making me feel weirdly homesick. There were plenty of things about my old world and my old life that I didn't miss at all. The music wasn't one of those things. The bards in this world probably all thought rock'n'roll was a dwarven fighting technique. "Never mind," I muttered. "Let's just keep going."

The second walkway led to an archway, which led into a long, featureless hallway.

Our next surprise heralded itself with a click. Valen stiffened. "Fire trap!" he barked, and threw himself on top of me. I had just enough time to register a whole lot of mithril coming at me before my back hit the ground. A split second later, red-orange light and crackling heat whooshed towards us, blooming like a terrible flower. I felt Valen's body wrap around mine, blocking the brunt of the fire as it washed over us.

A few seconds and an eternity later, the fire faded. I stared up at Valen from a distance of a few inches. From further away, his skin had looked flawless, like porcelain, but this close I could see that he actually had a smattering of very faint freckles across the bridge of his nose. "Um," I said. "Hi." My brain kicked back into gear. "Shit." My palms hovered a hair's breadth from his shoulders. "Are…are you all right?"

Valen nodded. "I am fine," he said tersely. "I do not burn easily." He pushed himself up to a kneeling position and ran his eyes over me, frowning. "It is you I am worried about. You have no such protection. Are you all right?"

I felt a little toasty, but no more than I'd gotten from sitting too near a campfire. Valen had done a credible imitation of a fire blanket. He should have been burnt to a crisp, but instead, he just looked a little flushed. "Oh," I said, my voice faint. "You're fireproof."

The tiefling shrugged uneasily. "Not entirely. But I am harder to burn than most humans." His voice lowered to a mutter. "My infernal taint is more trouble than it is worth, but at least it has _some_ uses." His eyes focused on me. "You, on the other hand, have no such protection. Are you sure you are unhurt?"

I blinked up at him owlishly. "Hmm? What? Oh. No. I'm fine. I mean, I feel kinda like somebody should slap a piece of chocolate on me and stick me between a couple of graham crackers, maybe sing a couple rounds of Kumbaya, but aside from that, I'm fine." I struggled upright. "Deeks?" I hadn't heard a peep from the kobold since the trap went off. "Are you okay?"

The kobold's voice came from further down the hall. "Well, the good news is, Deekin be okay."

I blew out a relieved breath at the sound of Deekin's shrill voice. I'd never been so happy to hear such an annoying sound. "And the bad news?"

"Well, the bad news is, if Deekin wore pants, he'd be needing a new pair right now."

I clambered to my feet. "Good thing you don't wear pants, huh, Deeks?"

"Yeah, well, just be careful where you step, Boss, that all Deekin gonna say."

"I was happier not knowing that, Deeks."

"Sorry, Boss."

I ran a hand through my hair, though I had the feeling I wasn't so much settling its disarray as rearranging it. "Anyone have any idea how we triggered that trap?"

"Nope. Sorry, Boss. If there be a mechanism, it be a little too complicated for little Deekin."

I met Valen's eyes. "Do we keep going?"

The tiefling hesitated. Then he shrugged. "We have come this far and survived," he said, and rose to his feet with such easy grace it was as if he'd been pulled upright on strings, like a marionette. "We might as well keep going."

I stood and staggered after him with no ease and zero grace. "Right," I muttered. "I mean, hell, what could possibly go wrong?"

Valen shot me an acerbic glance over his shoulder. "Would you like me to write you a list?"

I tried to think of the kinds of awful possibilities a survivor of Hell might come up with. "That's all right. I'll just use my imagination."

At that, the tiefling gave a husky little chuckle and led the way into the next chamber, where we found our passage blocked by a giant floating eyeball.

The eyeball spun in midair to look at me. I bit back a scream, and also the urge to hide behind Valen and all of that reassuringly sturdy mithril he was wearing. Air whipped around me and coalesced into a dead-magic shield at my wrist. "What the hell is _that_?"

Valen frowned at it. "Something I am obviously going to have to add to the list. I wonder, does it go under 'E', for 'eyeball', or 'H', for 'horrific'?"

"Er. It probably go under 'E'." That was Deekin. "You usually alphabetizes by nouns, not by adjectives."

"Ah. Good to know. Thank you, lizard."

"No problem, goat-man." That little appellation had Valen's teeth audibly grinding, but that was his own damn fault, barking 'lizard' at Deekin when I was pretty sure he wouldn't take half so kindly to being on the receiving end of 'tiefling' in the same tone.

A voice came out of the eyeball. It was mechanical and toneless, like a recorded message. "None shall pass into the inner sanctum without first speaking the word of passage, as given unto me by the Maker himself," it said. "Speak the word or face the consequences of your ignorance."

I stared at the thing. It stared back, unblinking. My eyes started to water. "Deeks?" I said out of the corner of my mouth. "Little help here?"

The kobold's pack erupted in a spray of parchment. He pawed through his notes, making nervous little humming noises as his eyes scanned page after page. "Wait," he muttered. "Wait, wait, wait…" Then he blinked and looked up. "Oh! I gots it. Wow. It really be that simple?" He drew himself up to his full height, all three feet or so, and addressed the floating eyeball. "The word of passage be 'dragisla'."

The eyeball blinked. "You speak the word correctly: the name of the Maker, unmade," it intoned. Gently, it drifted to one side. "You may pass into the presence of the exalted Maker."

Deekin grinned and shoved his papers back into his bag. "Cool!" he burbled, and trotted past the eyeball, his eyes bright and his arms wrapped around his pack. "Wow. Deekin so glad he came here. There be so much material. Maybe there even be enough for _two_ books! Maybe even a trilogy!" He spared me a backwards glance. "Coming, Boss?"

Valen stared at the kobold. Then he shook his head. "That little creature is full of some very large surprises."

"And you weren't even there that one time when he managed to sneak past a bunch of zombies by rolling in camel shit," I muttered.

Valen's eyebrow rose in stages, as if it had risen a little, and then he'd thought about what I'd said hard enough to get a clear mental picture, and then the horror had pushed it a little higher still. "I…think I am glad to have missed that."

"Yeah. I only wish _I_ had." I glanced at him sideways. After a moment, I heaved a sigh and relented a little. "You willing to listen to some advice?"

Valen turned his head slightly, returning my sidelong glance. "That depends on the advice."

That wasn't a promising start, but I'd dealt with tough crowds before. "Deekin's a little guy. Pretty much everybody's bigger than him, and he knows it, so if somebody bigger pushes him around, he doesn't push back. He just gives them exactly what they were asking for."

"Which is?"

"Which is a dumb kobold who farts when he walks by you and acts like he seriously thinks you're part goat."

Valen scowled in sudden, annoyed disbelief. "You are saying that he does that _deliberately_?"

I bit back a curse. "I'm saying," I said evenly, "-that you might be surprised how much nicer he gets when you're not calling him a _creature_. Or a lizard. Or threatening to behead him." I shrugged. "Just saying."

A slow flush crawled up the man's cheeks. He ran a hand through his hair. "I shall…try to be more patient with him," he said, without much conviction.

I supposed it was a start. I patted his armored shoulder. "Good. Don't worry. If I can keep myself from strangling him, anyone can."

Valen grimaced. "I think you underestimate my temper."

I laughed shortly. "I think you underestimate mine." Without giving him a chance to respond, I hurried to catch up to Deekin. "How the hell'd you figure out that password?" I asked him.

The kobold shrugged. "Easy. It be the Maker's name, only backwards. Alsigard. Dragisla. Get it? The Maker's name, unmade. Makes perfect sense, when you thinks about it."

I blinked a few times. "Deeks, you're an unsung genius."

Deekin beamed. "Aw. Thanks, Boss. That be awfully sweet of you to say."

I laughed. Only Deekin could call _me_ sweet and mean it. "You're welcome, little buddy."

The doorway behind the eyeball guardian led into a narrow hall. Warily, I held my dead-magic shield up with one arm and settled my grip around Enserric with the other hand. The black greatsword was too unwieldy to use one-handed, but going into a mage's sanctum without magical protection seemed like a worse idea than going in with a half-assed grip on my sword.

At the end of the hall stood a single chamber, roughly the size of a small apartment, dust-covered and still lit with those flickering, lightning-in-a-bottle lamps. Benches and bookshelves and metal-bound trucks stood all along the walls, the benches piled with strange tools. Some of them looked surgical. Others looked like they belonged in a forge. Things floated in jars, inert, and ingots of silver and gold and stranger metals were stacked on mushroom fiber pallets.

All alone in the center of the room stood an enormous desk. A skeleton was seated at it, dressed in the remnants of a mage's robe. It had a book open in front of it, but its empty eye sockets were trained on eternity.

Deekin gasped. "Cool!" he exclaimed. He dropped his pack and scuttled over to the benches, stretching up on tip-toe to peer at their contents. "What be all this?" He snatched something. "Oooh. Wand of fireballs. Nice." The wand went into Deekin's sack. "Oh, and a scarab amulet! That be worth something."

I winced. "Please be careful, Deeks," I said, although I didn't know why I was saying it. The kobold had survived a lot, including about a year of wandering around on his own after I ran off. He was probably better at spotting - and dodging - danger than I was. "Just…don't pick up anything that explodes."

Valen crossed to the desk. "So this is the Maker," he said. He stopped and looked down at the skeleton. His voice took on a brooding tone. "This is what all of his work came to. Dying alone at his desk, his aspirations unfulfilled, his corpse rotting as his marvelous creations squat here for centuries and bicker over technicalities."

I shook my dead-magic shield away and joined the moody redhead at the desk. "I don't know about that," I disagreed. "His marvelous creations might not be perfect, but they're still pretty impressive. Plus, if they help us against the Valsharess, you could argue they'll be helping make the world a better place."

Valen's face turned thoughtful. "That is not a bad legacy," he admitted.

"There are worse," I said blithely. "As a matter of fact-"

A screechy voice called across the room, slicing right through my words. "Hey, Boss, what's this big glowy sparkly thing?" I heard a faint zapping noise and a pained yelp. "Ow! That tingled. Deekin wasn't expecting that."

Valen and I exchanged glances. The tiefling had a pained expression on his face. "You were saying something about not picking up anything explosive?" he muttered.

I sighed and strolled in the direction of Deekin's voice. "Well, at least we're all still in one piece."

Valen followed. "For now," he added grimly.

I glanced over my shoulder. "Optimism's not your strong point, is it?"

Valen's voice floated back to me like a half-deflated balloon. "Not really, no."

The kobold was standing behind a screen that portioned off a section of the room into what looked like a little sleeping alcove. There was an ancient bed, a nightstand, and a small writing desk with a big, glowy sparkly thing in a brass stand. The thing was a clear glass tube, just small enough around to grip in one hand, and it looked like somebody had filled it with lightning, crackling little blue-white ripples of light that flickered so fast they gave off something close to a steady glow.

I studied the thing curiously as I approached. "So this is the golems' battery," I mused. I looked at Deekin. "Can I pick it up? Is the stand trapped at all?"

"Er. No. Not that Deekin can tell."

I touched my holy symbol for reassurance before stretching my hand out over the Power Source. Then I hesitated. "So….what you're saying here is either there are no traps, or there are and you just don't know about them."

"Pretty much. Sorry, Boss. Deekin not an ancient duergar sorcerer. He not know all their tricks."

I rolled my eyes. "You're lucky I like to live dangerously," I grumbled, and picked up the Power Source.

As soon as I took it in hand, the Power Source began to purr against my skin. I could feel the power in me stir in response, like calling to like. I lifted the artifact up to eye level, fascinated. With my inner eye, I watched as waves crashed against the inner bounds of the tube and became particles and then rebounded and became waves again. They zipped and flowed so quickly from one state to another, from one place to another, that it almost seemed like they didn't change at all – as if what they were really doing was occupying all states and all places, all at once. They were chaos, but from their chaos arose a strange sort of order, a higher structure I could sense but couldn't make any sense _of_ , like a shadow glimpsed from the corner of my eye.

I set Enserric down and held out my empty hand. Like water flowing downhill, the energy in the Power Source streamed into my open palm. Strands of ever-shifting white light snaked around my fingers, then around my wrist, until my hand was gloved in a web of light. "Beautiful," I murmured. It was so pure, so clean - like the essence of a storm, distilled and bottled.

I turned to find both Valen and Deekin staring at me. "What?" I asked. A faint crackle overhead and a strange feeling of lightness clued me in. I sighed. "My hair's doing the thing again, isn't it?" They both nodded. I sighed again. "Damn it. All right. Let's just get this done and get out of here so I can stop looking like a crazy person."

"That's gonna take a whole lot more than leaving the room, Boss."

I rolled my eyes. "Funny, Deeks. Very funny." I looked down at him. "You all done pillaging the place?"

The kobold grinned and held up a small bag. "Yep!" he said happily. "Deekin thinks he got everything."

I looked at the bag. It really wasn't big at all. "In there? What'd you do, jump up and down on it to make everything fit?"

"No need." Deekin looked at my face and giggled. "Here. Let Deekin show you." Then he reached into the little bag and pulled out a big crossbow.

I took a startled step back. "How…"

Valen drew his hand over his face. "Why is it that every time I think this world can no longer surprise me, it immediately finds some way to prove me wrong?" he muttered, as if to himself.

I watched Deekin slip the crossbow back into a bag that looked barely big enough to hold a dagger. "Is that a bag of holding he's, uh…holding?"

Valen's voice verged on despairing. " _Yes_."

"Aren't those expensive?"

"Unfathomably."

I turned a wide-eyed stare on Deekin. "How'd you get that?"

Deekin shrugged. "Easy," he said. "Deekin bought it. We got lots of money from Undrentide, remember? Deekin's poor back got so tired of lugging all his stuff around, just lug lug lug all day, so one day he thinks maybe he should have a better bag and he goes into a store in Silverymoon and...huzzah!" He shook the bag, grinning. "Now he not gotta do all that lugging anymore."

I blinked again. "Oh," I said. Then I shrugged and accepted it. With Deekin, it was best not to ask too many questions. "Fine. If you're ready to go, why don't you sing us invisible?" I hefted the Power Source in one hand. It didn't take much hefting. The blown glass was as light as dandelion fluff. "I'm hoping we can get this back to Ferron before Aghaaz catches on."

My hope lasted all the way through Deekin's song and down the hall and through the archway to the Maker's cavern, where it did what hope always did and died, suddenly and horribly.

Aghaaz was waiting for us.

* * *

 _A/N: I veered pretty wildly off-canon in this chapter and the next, but had much more fun with the whole thing this way. ;) I felt like the whole demi-lich thing was set up for players to have an evil foozle to kill, but there was something more satisfying, story-wise, about the Maker simply being dead and the golems living above his corpse for all that time, gradually coming to worship the dead man as a god and either not knowing or, in the case of Aghaaz, lying about the truth. Much more interesting than "floating skull tries to kill everyone", if'n you ask me._

 _We'll go even further off the rails of the original plot next chapter, and I had even MORE fun with that one. Stay tuned!_


	33. Titans

_A/N: This was one of my favorite chapters to write. I practically re-wrote the game plot but had so much fun with it and got to play with so many different ideas that I don't even care. Pfft. It's my story and I'll do what I want to._

 _Thanks to all my reviewers, and enjoy!_

* * *

 _Do you walk in the valley of kings?_  
 _Do you walk in the shadow of men_  
 _Who sold their lives to a dream?_  
 _Do you ponder the manner of things_  
 _In the dark_  
 _The dark, the dark, the dark_

 _I am flesh and I am bone_  
 _Arise, ting ting, like glitter and gold_  
 _I've got fire in my soul_  
 _Rise up, ting ting, like glitter  
_ _Like glitter and gold_

\- Barns Courtney, "Glitter & Gold"

~*~  
Chapter 33: Titans  
~*~

I slowed, then stopped. Deekin's slight weight bumped into my calf. Behind me, metal clinked, then went still.

Aghaaz stood between us and the way out, standing on the narrow stone bridge with close to a dozen of his fellow demon-flesh golems arrayed behind him like a declaration of war.

 _Crap_. I hadn't been counting on this.

Aghaaz's fiery, mismatched eyes scanned the seemingly empty air where we stood. "You might as well show yourself," he said pleasantly. "I know you are there." His wings moved gently in the subterranean wind as he spoke. "My people soon pieced together that my brother's attack was merely a diversion, designed to draw my guards away," he went on, and shrugged. "No matter. I placed new guards, and this time, they know not to move. You will have to kill them to make it past them." Aghaaz limped forward. One of his legs was longer than the other. "As the Maker's traps have been defeated, it is logical to assume you must have reached the sanctum, and as my guards still live, it is logical to assume that you are still here." He showed his terrible mish-mash of teeth in what must have been meant as a smile. "Thus, you see, there is no purpose to hiding."

I stood, stock still and tense. A swirl of air flicked a strand of hair across my nose. My breath steadied. I wasn't alone. I wasn't helpless. There was wind here, and lightning humming in my hand. Granted, there was also no way out except through Aghaaz, but I was choosing to view that state of affairs as temporary – just as soon as I could figure out how to change it.

 _Guess it's time to see how well I can bluff on a bad hand._

I put on my best smile and spoke, my invisibility falling away as my voice rose. I didn't look behind me. Deekin was our joker, Valen our ace in the hole, and I just had to hope that they had the sense to keep their faces hidden until it was time for them to put themselves into play. "Aghaaz!" I gushed, as if we'd just run into each other down at the hair salon. I didn't even bother trying to hide the Power Source – it glowed in my hand like a lighthouse beacon. "How _absolutely_ lovely to see you."

Aghaaz smiled with altogether too many teeth. "Quite. I was just looking for you."

 _To shut your whore mouth,_ I translated. "What a coincidence!" I burbled. "I was just looking for _you_." _So we could sneak past you._

The demon-flesh golem didn't budge. "Do you bring news?"

I interpreted that as, _Have you killed Ferron yet?_ with a side of, _You'd better have a damn good reason to be holding my brain battery, bitch._ "We do," I said. "News of the Maker, in fact," which in the language of doublespeak meant: _I know the truth. Back off or I'll out you as a liar, and we'll see what your people think of you then._ "Why don't we go someplace quiet and discuss it?" _So you can't sic your sycophants on us._

Aghaaz's grin widened. "I trust my people to hear whatever we discuss," he said, which I took to mean, _I like ten-to-three odds a lot better than one-to-three, thanks._

The golem liked his odds, but I didn't like ours. I needed to even them, and for that, I needed to stall. I needed a distraction. "Do you trust your people with the truth?" I asked Aghaaz.

Aghaaz folded his wings, tranquil in the face of my needling. "I have the truth," he said. "The Maker has granted me the wisdom to tell truth from lies, and the power to guide my people in his absence. Nothing you say can shake my faith in the Maker." His eyes were on the glowing glass cylinder in my hand. "I see that you have retrieved the Power Source," he added. He held out a hand. Some of his fingers were red, some black, like they'd come from different corpses. "Give it to me, and we will talk."

I stared at the golem's face. There was something there. I couldn't tell what. Then, when I traced the line of his gaze, I figured it out. He was staring at the Power Source so hard it was as if he couldn't see anything else. Suddenly smiling, I raised the Power Source above my head, and watched the desperate way the golem's eyes followed it. I had his attention – and my distraction. "You didn't say please," I chided. "That's rude, Aghaaz. Didn't your Maker teach you any manners?"

The golem stiffened. "Give it to me. Now."

I cocked my head. "Why?" I asked, putting on a tone of innocent curiosity. I tilted my upraised hand, let the Power Source roll forward over my palm until I caught it in my hooked fingers. I saw Aghaaz flinch, and I smiled. He was afraid. I knew it in my gut. He was afraid because I held the one thing standing between him and an existence as a brainless pile of meat. "Aw. I'm sorry," I crooned. "Am I making you nervous?" I looked up at the glowing cylinder in my hand. "I wonder what would happen if this thing broke," I mused. "Would you get really smart, or would it blow your brains to smithereens?" I raised the Power Source higher. "Shall we find out?"

The demon-golem made as if to step forward, then stopped. "Put. It. Down!"

I was getting to him, I was sure of it. He was getting angry, hopefully even getting stupid. "Not until you tell the truth, Aghaaz."

Aghaaz's voice rose. "The truth about _what_?"

 _I'm_ so _glad you let me con you into asking that question._ "The truth about your Maker," I answered. I stepped forward, watching him watch _me_ like I was a ticking bomb. "Tell me, Aghaaz. Did you wait until your Maker's corpse was cold? Or were you so thirsty for power that you annointed yourself High Priest while he was still breathing?" I looked at the golems standing behind him and raised my voice. "Your Maker's dead, and has been for centuries. Did you know that? He's no more a god than I am. Aghaaz has been lying-"

Aghaaz roared. "Baseless accusations, from an outsider, a thief, a traitor-"

There was movement behind Aghaaz – golems, shifting their feet, shifting their eyes. I saw questions in the way they moved. I sensed opportunity. "You're the traitor, Aghaaz," I threw his words back in his face. "You've enslaved your own people with a lie. You've told them you know the will of the Maker, but the Maker's dead, and I'm willing to bet he never even told you what he wanted. You made it up, Aghaaz. You made it all up, just so you could be in charge."

Aghaaz lurched forward a half-step. "You will cease this foolishness immediately!"

He wanted foolish? I'd give him foolish. I stuck my tongue out between my teeth and grinned. "Aghaaz is a liii-aaar," I sang mockingly.

The demon-golem snarled and took another step forward. "Shut your mouth!"

 _Almost there._ "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"

The golem's wings snapped open. His eyes flared red and his voice rose to a scream, and at last, he sprang forward, rage-blinded. "Shut! Up!"

I watched the golem close the distance between us, strangely calm. I filled my lungs and belly with breath, touched Deekin's invisible shoulder, willed all the speed I could into him through my touch, and barked, "Get Ferron. _Now_."

Deekin didn't hesitate. Claws scrabbled. The kobold winked into view just as he shot between Aghaaz's legs and sped down the walkway. One of the other golems stared down at him and half-reached as if to stop him. Deekin grabbed the golem's leg and slingshotted around it without slowing down, then went down on all fours for an extra turn of speed. The other golems watched, stunned. Some hesitated and others looked at Aghaaz for instruction, but Aghaaz wasn't paying attention to them and so they all did nothing as the little bard escaped.

Aghaaz was beyond caring what one little kobold did. He reached me, eyes blazing. His hand closed around my neck and lifted me off my feet. Enserric clattered to the ground, but I managed to hold on to the Power Source, even as Aghaaz swung me out over the empty air. "Now I will speak, and you will listen!" Aghaaz roared in my face, his breath hot as hell and twice as filthy. "Weak, disorderly, imperfect creature!"

A flail rattled. "Put her down," Valen growled. "Now."

I shook my head, as much as I could with Aghaaz's fist around my throat. "Wait," I croaked, or tried to. Aghaaz's grip was cutting off my air. I wrapped my free hand around his wrist and used it to lever myself up, take some of my weight so Aghaaz's fist didn't become a noose. I didn't try to put up a fight. The longer I could stall Aghaaz, the better. _Gotta trust Deeks. Gotta, heh, hang on 'til he comes back with Ferron._ "Wait."

Aghaaz lifted me higher, his hand tightening. "I am the High Priest of the Maker," he hissed, for my ears alone. "If he dies, my claim to power dies with him. Do you understand?"

I stared down into his mad red eyes. _Oh, I understand, all right. You care more about your power than your people._ My feet dangled over the sucking dark of a cavern so deep I couldn't see the ground. I looked at Aghaaz and held the Power Source out, arm's length away from me and out of arm's reach for him. "Drop me," I wheezed. My voice was weak. My fingers flexed on his wrist, and my vision shifted. I saw red – red, and white, and, at the edges of my vision, black closing in. "Dare ya."

Aghaaz returned my stare, sudden dismay widening his eyes. Not hard to figure out why - if he dropped me, the Power Source dropped with me, and even if he could fly with those fucked-up wings of his, there was no guarantee he'd be able to catch his brain battery before it hit the floor and shattered into a million pieces. His voice took on a note of pleading. "Why are you doing this? What do you want?"

I thought of Ferron's people, living for centuries in the same place, chained to a life they didn't want and hadn't chosen. "Free will," I whispered through my closing throat, and with a twist of power and thought, I broke the golem's arm.

The crack echoed through the cavern like a gunshot. Aghaaz screamed and dropped me.

I fell. I knew I didn't really have to worry, not as long as Shaundakul was watching over me, but it was hard to keep faith in mind and fear at bay with the world rushing past me the wrong way, so I closed my eyes and prayed and held on to the Power Source as hard as I could and reached out and pulled the air in.

My back hit something. It yielded for a second, like a mattress, then firmed as I reflexively drew more air around me.

Silence fell.

The world had stopped moving. I could breathe again, sort of, although I could feel the hot ache of deep bruises already settling into my throat.

I risked opening my eyes. I saw black around me, and above, pale stone. My eyes traced it and found the edge of the walkway. So I hadn't fallen far. That was good. I wasn't sure how far I'd be able to climb.

Carefully, I reached out with one hand and patted the air around me. It felt solid. _Good enough._ Moving very slowly, because there was tempting fate and then there was giving fate a lap dance, I stood up.

Then I looked up.

Aghaaz was standing at the edge of the walkway, staring down at me. I drew in breath and air to bolster my faltering voice. "Hey, Aghaaz!" I called.

The demon-flesh golem jerked, then scowled at me. "How-"

I held up the Power Source. I could feel the wild energy of the storm seething within it, singing to me like a caged bird, so I called to it and it came, spilling out of its tube and into my open hand. In an instant, my arm was sheathed in light to the elbow. "Catch!" I called, and hurled a ball of lightning right at Aghaaz.

Light flashed, the air split with the sonic boom of thunder, and Aghaaz was blasted backwards off the walkway. He didn't make a sound.

I blinked my eyes to clear them of spots. Then I stamped my feet on the air a couple times and started to climb, whisking the wind into steps which solidified under my feet as I went. It was slow going and yet it still made my heart pound as if I was running up a flight of stairs, but as long as I didn't actually think about what I was doing or the many reasons why I shouldn't be doing it, it wasn't _too_ hard.

Stone sank past me. My head drew level with the walkway, then my eyes, then my shoulders, and then I was standing in midair level with the path but a few paces away, and Valen was standing on the stone tiles, staring at me over the empty space with the stunned expression of somebody who'd just gotten a heavy blow to the head.

I frowned. Had Aghaaz managed to land a hit on him before going down? It took a couple of tries to force sound from my throat, which felt like a million cases of laryngitis rolled into one red hot bundle of agony. "You all ri-"

Wings beat like drums, drowning out the sound of my voice. I spun.

Aghaaz rose from the blackness on the opposite side of the walkway, one eye blazing yellow and the other burning red. He hung in the air like an omen. "Truly?" he said flatly. His arm was dangling limply, but he didn't seem to be paying it any mind. " _That_ was your best gambit?"

I stared at the demon-flesh golem. "Well, shit. That usually works."

Aghaaz sneered at me, showing teeth that went every which way but the right way. Then he turned his head, roaring out an order to his followers. "Kill the intruders, by the will of the Maker!"

The other golems looked at each other. Then, obediently, some of them launched themselves into the air, wings snapping open. Others lingered, a handful, crouching down low with their wings curling around them, hesitant.

I wavered for a moment, watching golems climb on the subterranean wind. Then my eyes narrowed. These motherfuckers were in the air. They were in _my_ air, in Shaundakul's domain, and if these fools thought those wings meant that they owned the wind, they were in for an unpleasant surprise. _Nobody_ owned the wind – although, if you asked nicely enough and it liked you enough, it might be willing to do you a favor.

I smiled – not nicely - and touched my holy symbol. Then I looked around, assessing. Deekin was nowhere to be seen, but Valen was still standing. He may have been a weapon master, and a scrappy son of a bitch besides, but he was also badly outnumbered. I needed to even the odds.

I caught Valen's eyes with my own. The wind amplified my voice, making it boom across the cavern in spite of the damage Aghaaz had done to my throat. "Get down," I ordered, and there was dad's voice again, coming out like it was hard-coded into my vocal cords. Valen took one look at my face and dropped to his stomach. I nodded once, satisfied that he was out of harm's way. Then I lifted my eyes and let the power flare out of me, calling.

The wind came. It came whirling, roiling, _howling_ out of every corner of the cavern to slam into red bodies, to sting red eyes with dust and snap fragile tendons and sweep up everything in its wake. Golems hit the walls. Golems hit the floor. Golems tumbled, screeching and clawing, into the far darkness.

Standing on nothing, the wind roaring around me without touching me, I watched the chaos unfold and waited to see what would happen next.

Eventually, the wind receded and the dust settled enough for me to take stock. A couple of golems weren't moving any more and one was on the ground, moaning and dragging himself painfully across the stone, leaving red smears behind him. Some were shrieking at the far ends of the cavern, alive but scattered.

Those were the golems that had obeyed. The others, the ones who had hesitated, watched their brethren scatter. They didn't move except to cluster closer together, in the way of people who'd just gotten a shock and didn't know what to do except huddle and wish this wasn't happening.

Claws scraped stone. I turned to see a red hand grab the edge of the walkway. Aghaaz's head heaved into view, followed by the rest of his body. It was steaming. "You," he snarled. "Have made a _very_ big mistake."

Disbelieving rage rose in my throat, almost washing away the pain. "Yeah," I croaked. "I didn't decommission you the first time I saw you."

Aghaaz's response was, I supposed, only natural, given the provocation. The golem screamed and flung himself into the air, coming for me. He ignored Valen, which I also supposed made sense – Valen hadn't been the one to take a massive, steaming verbal dump all over his authority, and right in front of his underlings, too.

Aghaaz dove towards me, and just before he got to me, something big and winged appeared on my peripheral vision and slammed into him, driving him sideways, and suddenly there were two golems in the air, Aghaaz and another, red bodies writhing as they grappled.

After a confused flurry of motion, the bigger golem, Aghaaz, heaved and threw the smaller one away. It tumbled through the air, then righted itself with a few thrusts of its wings, coming up to hover out of arm's reach of its bigger sibling. "What are you doing, Aghaaz?" it shouted. Its voice was higher, its skin a red so dark it was almost black, and both of its eyes were bright orange. "You said not to harm those who have not harmed us! You said it was the Maker's will!"

Aghaaz snarled. "This human _has_ harmed us. She is Ferron's creature, here to turn golem against golem with her master's lies."

The smaller golem recoiled uncertainly. Still, he persisted. "Then what was she doing in the Holy Place? You said none could come here except by the Maker's will. How do we know she does not serve the Maker?"

"Because she does not!"

The black-skinned golem hovered, blinking in confused concern. "Error. Your logic is circular."

Aghaaz looked at his underling, then modulated his tone, going suddenly reasonable. "You know better than to doubt me, Mhaat. Have I not always guided you? Protected you?"

Mhaat's eyes went past Aghaaz, to the door to the Maker's lab. "Yes, but…"

The bigger golem rose above the smaller, eyes blazing. "There are no buts," Aghaaz roared. "There are no questions. There is only the will of the Maker."

Mhaat's wings cupped the air, drawing him a little further from Aghaaz. "Then, I beg you, Aghaaz, let us see the Maker," he pleaded.

Aghaaz stiffened. "I cannot."

Mhaat regarded his brother with a new wariness. "Cannot? Or will not?"

Aghaaz's voice took on a quaver of sweaty desperation. "I cannot. I promise you, Mhaat, it is not my desire to hide the Maker from you."

Mhaat was silent for a long, drawn-out heartbeat. "But we are here. The way to the Maker is open. Why does the Maker hide himself?"

Aghaaz hesitated. "I…I do not know."

Mhaat cocked his head. "Error," he said, his voice puzzled. "Are you stating that the will of the Maker is not known to you?"

Too late, Aghaaz seemed to realize his mistake. "I did not say that-"

The other golem interrupted him. "If you know the Maker's will, then you must know why he hides himself," he argued. "If you do not know that, you do not fully know his will." Mhaat paused, his head turning and his orange eyes going once again to the door that led to where the Maker's corpse sat behind its desk. "I…I must see the Maker. I must know his will for myself," he announced then, and without waiting for argument from Aghaaz, he folded his wings and dove, heading for the door to the Maker's sanctum.

Aghaaz spun in midair, seeming too stunned to do anything but watch his erstwhile underling go. "I…I did not mean that. I did not say…" He spun again, his eyes falling on me. "You!" he screamed. "This is your doing!" Then he, too, folded his wings, and he came for me, and this time there was no one there to stop him, and I'd already seen what good lightning did against demon-flesh.

I watched winged red death come for me, and I thought, just as hard as I could, of fog.

I thought of the distant shore of Chult, wreathed in early morning mist as my ship drifted into the bay. I thought of the smog over Athkatla in the heat of summer, of the thick gray banks of fog that rolled though the Mirkwood, of the tattered mist that floated over the valley of the River Rauvin in the early morning, a sight I'd seen many times while sitting, sick and grieving, on Nathan Hurst's front porch.

My body went weightless an instant before a heavy red body flashed through the air where I'd just been standing.

I didn't have much time to contemplate my close call, though, because maybe the wind was my friend but it was also the wind and I was a cloud, and I'd forgotten what the wind did to clouds.

I sped away, struggling, caught in a current of air like a minnow in an undertow. Stone and shadow flashed by – too fast, too far. If I had a voice, I would have cursed.

As if in answer, a voice came to me – not mine, but a waterfall whisper that permeated everything and resonated in the bones I didn't have. _Do not fight it, child,_ Shaundakul told me. _Ride it_.

I splashed against a wall, splitting into wisps for a second before reforming into one, cohesive cloud, and then it was lucky I couldn't scream because otherwise I would have been doing it so loudly they could have heard me on the surface. _The fuck you mean, 'ride it'?_ I wailed without sound. _It's riding me!_

Shaundakul laughed at me. _I have faith._

 _Faith in_ what _?_

 _Faith that you will find your wings, my falcon – if given adequate motivation._ Then some spectral hand gave me a shove, sending me tumbling into the wind's currents.

I'd have told my god exactly what I thought of all this, but then the currents whisked me away, this time up and around, and I lost track of everything, including coherent thought.

Shaundakul's whisper came to me. _Trust the wind, child of mine. It knows you for its own. It will not harm you._

I spat a few more silent curses, but I stopped struggling. The wind dashed me, swirled me, plunged me like a rollercoaster. It was a good thing I no longer had a stomach, because if I did, it would have been heaving.

I tried to think. _All right. Trust the wind, he says._ Easier said than done, but at least it was easier than continuing to fight, so I relaxed into the wind's embrace, and…

…and, suddenly, things weren't quite so scary anymore. It was kind of like learning how to swim, those first lessons when you had to learn how to float by going limp and letting the water and your buoyant body do their thing without all of that intrusive input from your brain and you found out that the water was actually pretty friendly when you weren't trying to fight it.

I floated on the wind, light as a feather, insubstantial as a cloud. The breeze blew me up one wall and along the ceiling, and suddenly I could _see_ where the current was taking me, and from there I could see how this current met another and how the clash sent a new current swirling off from the old, and again, and again, splitting into a million different and equally chaotic paths.

Without eyes, I looked for a path that would take me somewhere useful, and found it… _There!_ If I let it, the wind would carry me back around to the central platform, where the lightning trap had been. I liked the looks of that – the platform was nice and big and hard to miss, unlike the bridges of stone on either side of it. I bunched nonexistent muscles to make myself as small as I could, my wispy form solidifying from a sparse summer cloud to something more like a thunderhead, and I rode the current down and around and around again.

The stone got closer.

 _Almost._

Closer still.

 _Wait for it._

The floor rose up.

 _Now!_

I thought of heavy things, like solid gold golems.

Mist billowed to flesh, reformed into armor and clothes and _oh fuck, the Power Source, I almost forgot about that_ and I saw the stone floor coming and somehow managed to turn a little and tuck myself into ball to protect the precious little tube of golem brain-juice, and then all there was left to do was brace and hope that this wouldn't hurt too much.

I slammed into the floor with a sound like a mortician's gurney falling out of a window, and it hurt just as much as I thought it would, proving once again that hope was for suckers.

My lungs forcibly rejected every last scrap of air that had been in them, and my stomach almost did the same for whatever was left of my last meal. Stars danced in front of my eyes. Urgent messages of pain arrived from all over my body, but there were so many of them that I couldn't quite figure out which ones I needed to listen to and which were just crybabies.

Distantly, I heard the sound of fighting – growling, wings beating, shouts, and close by, a heavy metal rattle punctuated by fleshy thuds. I tried to catch my breath, to move. It wasn't as easy as it should have been. Everything hurt. _Come on. Fight's not over. Get up._ Painfully, I rolled over. Spots danced in front of my eyes. I blinked, trying to clear my vision so I could see…

 _Valen._ He was on the bridge between me and the Maker's lab, squaring off with a demon-flesh golem, his flail whirling so fast that the golem kept having to pull its punches just to avoid getting its hands bashed to a pulp. It was also leaning strangely and wheezing, probably due to that flail-shaped dent in its rib-cage.

 _Well, looks like he's got things under control there_. I relaxed a little.

Then another golem landed a few paces behind the tiefling with a heavy thud that made dust balloon around it.

My heart jumped into my throat, jerking me half-upright. Instinct took over. Power rose with my breath, making gooseflesh rise all over me and my head spin. It sang in me, like to like, storm to storm, and as if in response to that call, light leapt out of the Power Source, pure and scorching, first to my hand and then into the golem behind Valen, all in one jagged, blinding stream.

The electric current struck the golem, launching it in a strangely graceful arc, but I wasn't satifised, not after seeing how Aghaaz had shaken off a single strike, so I kept the power flowing, following the golem's path up and over and down into the dark, until all I could see of it was a rising coil of smoke coming from where it had fallen.

That left Valen with one golem to deal with. Even as I turned my attention back to the fight, that one swung its fist at him, and the crazy ginger didn't just duck, he threw his flail to the ground and _dropped –_ down over the side of the walkway to hang by his hands with that long, long fall yawning under him, and for a moment I damn near screamed, yanking up my power again, ready to…well, I didn't know what, but I had to do _something_ because it seemed like he was about to fall and _he_ didn't have Shaundakul to catch him….

Then the golem leaned over the edge of the walkway, as if checking to see whether its opponent was still there, and that was when Valen's shoulders heaved and he did an improbably fast and powerful muscle-up and headbutted the golem right in the kisser.

I cringed, covering my face with my hand in a kind of pained sympathy. I'd seen Mags headbutt people before, and it had looked bad enough when she did it, but there was a fundamental difference between her and Valen: she didn't have _horns_.

The golem reeled back, suddenly screaming and clutching at the bloody mess his face had become. Valen took advantage of his opponent's distraction to leap back onto the bridge, grab his flail, swing it once over his head as if to build up a little momentum, then swing it a second time, right into the golem's already mangled face.

A sudden and terrible rearrangement occurred, in which the front of the golem's head appeared to come out of the back. Valen yanked his flail away in a shower of gore and gave the corpse a savage kick in the midsection. It fell limply into the dark. The man turned and shook his head a couple of times, baleful and blinking, as if to clear it. A vicious shade of red flickered in his eyes, just for a moment, until he looked at me and the otherworldly red glow faded into a sudden and altogether human frown of concern. Then a shadow moved over me and Valen's head snapped up, his eyes widening and flashing to red all over again.

Aghaaz landed a few feet away from me with a great inrush of air. "Enough," he rasped. "Disobedient wretch. Look what you have done!" He flung out one hand, indicating the cavern where golem fought golem. "You have torn us apart!"

I looked. Shapes grappled in the dark, surged over stone – golems fighting golems, everywhere I looked. "You did that, Aghaaz." My voice came strained through the pain in my throat, a harsh whisper, scarcely audible. I stood, painfully, clutching the Power Source to my chest. "I just told them the truth."

Aghaaz's breath seethed through his forest of crooked teeth. "I did what was needful for my people's sake." He began to stalk towards me. "And now, for their sake, I will make sure you do not live to incite more dissent among us."

I watched the golem come and calculated my odds. He was too close for me to run or pull my cloud trick again, too big to fight, had already shrugged off a direct hit with a big ol' ball of lightning, was too heavy to move with anything short of a hurricane, and even if Valen got to Aghaaz before the golem got to me, that just put two people at risk instead of one.

Desperate, I reached out to the wind, calling to it soundlessly with every last scrap of breath in my lungs.

The wind came to my call, flowing into a protective dome with a sound like a freight train, and as it did I realized that the storm in the Power Source was answering, too, streaming to the dome to form a crackling lattice that flared to blinding white just as Aghaaz's fist hit it.

The golem recoiled, sparks dancing over his skin. Smoke rose off of him, and sizzling blisters rose, but he didn't even seem to notice. "You cannot evade me forever!" he screamed. He paced outside my shield. "I swear by the Maker, I will-"

Another voice interrupted him. "You get away from Boss, you big, smelly meanie," it warned. "Or else."

Aghaaz spun, and I twisted. Deekin was standing at the bottom of the stairs, a tiny, resolute figure silhouetted in the Maker's fizzing lights. He had his crossbow aimed at Aghaaz. It was loaded, and the tip of its bolt had a pale blue glow.

Aghaaz looked at the kobold and laughed. "Or else what?" the golem demanded, chortling. "What could a creature like you possibly do to _me_?"

In response, Deekin's hand moved on the crossbow's trigger. The mechanism let go with a _clunk-thwip_ and the whistle of a bolt cutting through the air.

The bolt hit home. Aghaaz staggered a step backwards. A blue-white bloom of frost spread out from the bolt that was suddenly lodged in his leg. He spun, or tried to, his leg failing and wings flapping desperately to keep him upright. "It burns!" he screamed. "How is this possible? What have you done to me?"

Deekin grinned, his grey scales blending so well into the shadows that his toothy smile was almost all that was visible of him, like a reptilian Cheshire Cat. "Does it hurt?" he asked. "Good. That's what you get for hurting Boss." Calmly, Deekin reloaded. "As to what Deekin did, he stole a few bolts from Klonk the Freezer when he runs away from home. Thought maybe they comes in handy one day, and whaddya know! They just did." The bard sighted down the length of his crossbow, squinting. "Deekin figures if you be made of demon parts, then fire and lightning not hurt you so much, but ice?" He shot Aghaaz again, this time in the wing. The bolt tore through leathery membrane, leaving a ragged, ice-rimed hole in its wake. Aghaaz screamed again. Deekin nodded to himself, seeming satisfied. "Yep. Ice probably hurt you _real_ bad."

Aghaaz was standing crookedly, most of his weight on his good leg and his injured wing dangling uselessly. His breath seethed between his teeth. "You are irrelevant," he announced, almost as if reassuring himself. "Imperfect." Slowly, he straightened. Blood pattered to the floor. His voice rose. "You are _beneath_ me."

Deekin shrugged and lifted his crossbow. "Yeah, well, Deekin also gots good aim and you be a big, slow target, so maybe you better be nice to Boss or we gonna find out how many bolts Deekin can fit in your big, fat head." Aghaaz froze, at that, and the kobold and the golem stared at each other across the long bridge, neither of them moving.

Ferron's deep, reverberating voice broke through the standstill. "Peace." A shining form came down the stairs and stopped behind Deekin, stooping to lay a huge hand carefully on the kobold's shoulders. "You did well to bring me here, little one, but to end this conflict is my responsibility, not yours."

Aghaaz stared at his golden counterpart. "Brother." His voice was flat with hatred.

Ferron inclined his head in acknowledgement. "Ah," he said sadly. "Brother."

Aghaaz's lip curled. "Spare me your hypocritical mewling. You have brought chaos to these halls."

Ferron sighed. "Truth," he admitted. "This war is as much my doing as yours, but I could not bring myself to confront you directly." He walked over to one of the dead golems lying in the vestibule and studied it. His face was impossible to read, but his voice was heavy with grief. "Whatever else you have become, you have always been my brother. Rather than lift my hand against you, I allowed others to act in my stead, hoping they would find a better outcome than the one I fear we come to now." He looked up. "And now, my reluctance has killed those I sought to save."

Aghaaz snorted. "Lies. You feared to confront me because you knew I would defeat you."

Ferron's voice was mild. "Truth, in part. I feared many things. I feared you. I feared myself. I feared the truth of my existence, which is that I am an insignificant speck in a vast universe, alone with so many choices to make and no Maker to take that burden from me." Ferron's face rippled into a faint smile. "If this is sentience, I question the Maker's wisdom in giving it to beings so uniquely unsuited to it."

Aghaaz's wings flared, or tried to – his good one moved just fine, but the injured one didn't move at all. "Blasphemy," he hissed. "Even now, you continue to question his will."

Ferron shrugged. "Perhaps. You were always more passionate in your convictions than I. It is your nature." The golden golem spread his hands. "I…cannot help but to question. Perhaps that is _my_ nature."

Aghaaz's voice lashed out, sounding almost as if he were in agony. "There is no question! I am _right_!" he cried. "Everything I have done, I have done to protect us! Someone had to lead us, and so I did! Someone had to maintain order, and so I did!"

Ferron's voice was gentle. "I know." He shifted, his metal skin gleaming. "Do you remember what the Maker told us, the day he awakened us?"

Aghaaz hesitated. His head drooped in a weary nod, the rage suddenly gone out of him. "He told us that we were the eldest, and that it was our duty to keep our brothers safe."

"Which we did."

"Yes." Aghaaz's voice was a gravelly whisper. "Until we did not." His head lifted, slightly. "What went wrong?"

Ferron spoke calmly. "Nothing."

Aghaaz gestured around him, eyes burning. The surviving golems had gone still, watching, but they weren't nearly as still as the dead ones. "You call the destruction of our people 'nothing'?"

Ferron shook his head. "No. I call it a tragedy. But the changes that led us here became inevitable the moment we became aware."

Aghaaz's voice rang out. "No! We should never have allowed those changes to take place. We should have remained as we were."

"That was never our Maker's intent."

Aghaaz scoffed. "How do you know that?"

Ferron answered with that same slow, steady patience. "Sentient beings change, and he created us to live as sentient beings."

"Live?" Aghaaz barked a laugh. "Idiocy! We are constructs! We do not live."

"No?" Ferron raised his hands and studied them, turning them over and moving his fingers as if seeing them for the first time. "Then why am I so afraid to die?"

Aghaaz went still. "Ferron?" he asked cautiously. "What madness are you speaking now?"

Ferron's sigh was like a bellows, and made steam rise in a wreath above his head. "Not madness, Aghaaz. Clarity. At last, clarity." He leveled a steady gaze at his brother. "This war must end, Aghaaz. For the sake of what remains of our people."

Aghaaz paused. Then he shook his head. "We are too old, and there is too much bitterness between us," he said, and for once, there was no rage in his voice, only a sorrow to match Ferron's. "This war will not end until our deaths."

Ferron bowed his head briefly. "I know." Then he lifted his head, something mournful in the subdued flicker of his fiery eyes. "I am sorry, brother," he said. Then he spread his arms and charged, slow but inevitable and gaining speed as he went. The floor shook under his steps.

Aghaaz watched his brother coming, fear suddenly contorting his face, and he tried to move, to fly away or maybe dodge, but his leg buckled and his injured wing couldn't seem to unfurl.

Then Ferron crashed into his brother, his outspread arms closing around Aghaaz, and the momentum of his charge carried them both over the edge of the platform.

Their fall was long and soundless and at first it seemed like they hadn't fallen at all.

Then I felt the impact. It traveled like a shock wave, making the floor quiver under my feet and shaking dust from the ceiling and making the Maker's lanterns sway and spark.

Eventually, the echoes of the brothers' fall faded. Stillness fell in its place.

A demon-flesh golem came out of the dark to land at the edge of the platform, peering down. His eyes were green, like a cat's, and his red skin was mottled pink and black. "Aghaaz?" he called. There was no answer. His wings shivered uncertainly. "F-ferron?"

Other golems came – metal ones, flowing altogether too gracefully down the stairs and across the bridge to join their brethren, while the winged demon-flesh ones swooped in among them. None of them paid us any mind, as if they'd thoroughly forgotten about the puny humans – well, two humans and one kobold - in their midst. "What has happened, please?" a tall, skinny demon-golem asked. No one answered, although some confused murmurs started up almost immediately.

A silver golem trooped to the edge of the platform, stopping next to the green-eyed demon-flesh one. "Error," he said. His voice sounded lost. "Status of Ferron unknown. Course of action requested."

The green-eyed golem stared into the dark. "Course of action…unclear."

Voices rose. "Query. Is this the Maker's will?"

A demon-flesh golem wrung his uneven hands. "How can it be?" he wondered. "Why would the Maker will _this_?"

"Error formulating response. Insufficient data." That was one of the metal golems. "Requesting further input."

Another demon-flesh golem spoke up, the exasperation in his voice indicating that maybe some golems were further along with this whole independent thinking idea than others. "We _have_ no further input, metal-for-brains."

"Brothers." This voice rose above the rest, cutting through the babble. I turned my head to look, and glimpsed golems doing the same. Mhaat emerged from the archway to the Maker's sanctum, bending almost in half to clear the lintel. He had something cradled in his arms. It was wearing the decayed remains of a mage's robe. Mhaat carried it a few more paces, then knelt and gently laid the Maker's corpse down on the ground. He stood, solemn and still as a statue. "I found this in the Maker's sanctum."

One of the other demon-flesh golems took a cautious step forward. "And the Maker?"

Mhaat shook his head. "No living beings were present." He pointed a clawed hand at the corpse. "Just this." He looked up, his orange eyes wide. "I…I think it is the Maker."

If the babble had been confused before, now it was chaos.

"A mortal corpse?" a golem spluttered. "Impossible."

"Error." That was the echoing voice of one of Ferron's people, a big golem made of some silvery metal. "If the Maker is immortal, the Maker cannot be killed."

A small fight broke out.

A bronze golem's robotic voice boomed above the fray. "Ferron spoke truth! Aghaaz lied!"

A demon golem's harsh rasp answered it. "No! Aghaaz is the anointed. He would not lie."

"Your logic is in error," the bronze golem argued. "Aghaaz said the Maker lived. The Maker is dead. Therefore, Aghaaz lied."

" _Your_ logic is in error," the demon golem retorted.

"How is my logic in error?"

"Your assumption is without basis. How do we know that this corpse is of the Maker?"

"Who else would it be?"

The bronze golem's eyes flickered in confusion. "Unknown."

" _Exactly_."

A few golems detached from the argument and crept close to the corpse, wings twitching and metallic fingers flexing uneasily.

"That is the Maker?"

"It is so…small."

"Aghaaz said the Maker was a god. Query. Are gods small?"

"Unknown. Internal memorandum: Calculate average height of deities."

"What, all of them? Including those blobby ones with all the tentacles we saw in that book?"

There was a pause. "Update to internal memorandum: Calculate average height of all _readily measureable_ deities."

My shock started to wear off. _Well, it's good to know that if you give a golem a brain, it uses it to get just as confused as the rest of us_. But where were Ferron and Aghaaz? Maybe they were still alive. Maybe. Golems were hard to kill, anyway. I knew – I'd tried. I struggled to stand, and had made it as far as my knees when I was stopped by a scaled hand on my left wrist and a pale hand on my right shoulder.

Deekin's screechy voice sounded in my left ear. "You okay, Boss?"

Valen's silk-smoke voice – admittedly a whole lot easier on the ears, if not the nerves – snapped from my right. "She obviously is not."

"Oh, so you be the expert on Boss, now?"

I felt like a rope toy caught in a tug-of-war between a mastiff and a chihuaha. "Hey, leggo," I said, or tried to. My voice sounded like I'd spent all night screaming in a mosh pit. I yanked my arms back and fought my way back to my feet, taking an unsteady step towards the edge of the platform. "Gotta see."

Hastily, Valen stepped in front of me, scowling. "You are not thinking of going down there alone, are you?"

I stared at him. Then I stepped around him. "Won't be alone." A wave of my hand took in the golems around us. "Lots o' golems with me."

Valen stiffened. "You will not-"

I lifted my head and returned his scowl, my temperature rising. "What I do isn't up to you," I rasped.

Valen saw my scowl and raised it. "Then at least take your sword," he snapped, and shoved Enserric in my face. "Do not go down there unarmed." He paused. "Please."

I blinked, startled. I hadn't even noticed my sword in his hand. Then again, I had been looking at his face, not his hands. Flushing, I took Enserric. "Thanks," I said. I turned. "I'll be right back. I need to…" I trailed off. "I just need to know, okay?" Then I stepped off of the bridge. It was the most straightforward way I could think of to forestall another argument – at least, as long as the crazy tiefling didn't decide to dive after me. He _had_ headbutted a golem. After seeing that, I wouldn't put much past him.

The air thickened around me as I fell, as if I'd gone from falling through air to sinking through water, then through honey, then molasses. It got dark, then darker still. I reached into my pocket and willed light into my fluorspar with a whisper. The light was pale and weak, but it parted the darkness beneath my feet as I sank through it.

Gradually, the cavern floor surfaced from the gloom.

After a long, slow fall, my boots finally settled to the ground. Winged shadows broke the light as golems swooped in, settling to the ground in eerie silence.

Aghaaz and Ferron lay in a crater of cracked stone. Black blood was pooling under them, with rivulets of gold running through it. Neither golem was moving.

Winged golems were forming a reverent circle around the bodies, guided by some instinct that all living things felt in the face of death, even the ones that lived for hundreds of years and weren't all that clear what death looked like.

I'd lost two parents and too many friends, though, and I knew death when I saw it.

I turned from the dead to the living, temporarily at a loss for words. A memory surfaced, one I tried hard never to think about – a hospital room, a flat green line, and a concerned voice in a white coat, saying things that didn't mean anything but had to be said anyway. "They're gone," I told the golems. "I'm sorry." Then I turned and walked a little away, to give them privacy.

I stared out into the darkness, listening to golems get acquainted with one of the primary emotions of sentient life: grief.

Faintly, a new sound came to me. It was the sound of the wind rustling through leaves, and as it grew, the darkness seemed to recede. So did all of my aches and pains, of which I'd put together a nice little collection.

A moment later, a shadow coalesced at my side in a rush of cool air and pine-forest scent. "Well done, my Rebecca," Shaundakul murmured. "Well done, indeed."

I turned my head slightly. The golems were gone from my sight. The living ones, anyway. Aghaaz and Ferron were still there. Even in this waking dream Shaundakul had swept me into, Aghaaz and Ferron were there. Some things were too heavy to be altered – they bent the world around them, waking and dreaming. "If this was well done, then why doesn't it feel that way?" I asked.

Shaundakul's eyes were as silver as a mirror. I saw sadness in them. Then I realized that it was my own. "Because war brings grief," my god answered. "Even at its end." He laid a comforting hand on my shoulder. "But you have helped bring about a peace, exposed a truth that was hidden, and set a caged people free to find their own path." His smile warmed me. "I am proud of you, daughter mine."

I looked down, then away. "I'm not." There were dead golems up there as well as here, and the living ones had lost their leaders and their faith in one fell swoop.

Shaundakul chuckled. "Ah, my dear, defiant Rebecca." He touched my hair and let me go. "But I will say no more. You may think as you will. I shall not constrain you."

I smiled a little. "I know. Why do you think I'm still here?"

"I know why you are still here, dearest child. I know your nature. It is much like my own." Shaundakul's voice was gently teasing. "Thus do I know that the surest way to lose you is to hold you too tightly."

I barked a short, rueful laugh, followed by a sigh. "Yeah. I'm kind of like a bar of soap in a bathtub. Squeeze me too hard and you'll never find me again." I looked up. After all that had happened, I felt tired to the bone, and the way back to the light was long. "Um. I wouldn't mind a hand, though. If you felt like being helpful."

Shaundakul flashed me an impish grin. "Naturally," he said, his voice fading even as he spoke. The sound of wind and leaves receded. Darkness poured back in. Pain returned, briefly, and then I was dissolving into mist, cool and light and blessedly calm.

Then an unseen hand took me up and drew me into the air, not so much overriding the local wind patterns as reshaping them to ease my path. Apparently, I'd earned myself a little break from doing it the hard way, this time.

I floated up to where Deekin and Valen were waiting. Deekin's head turned as I flowed past them, his snout twitching and his eyes tracking me as if some sixth sense let him know where I was. To my surprise, Valen's head turned, too, and sharply, like I'd just tapped him on the shoulder. From the way his eyes passed over me, he didn't quite know where I was and maybe wasn't even sure it was me, but something about the way he stiffened and searched the air so alertly, just as I brushed by him, said that he sensed _something_. Maybe tieflings had a sixth sense, too.

I ghosted over stone and rematerialized a few feet away, feeling a faint flicker of regret as the dragging weight of my body enrobed me once more. "They're dead," I said, or tried to. My voice was almost gone, reduced to a raspy whisper. "Both of them."

Deekin crept over to me, one eye on the nearest golems. He looked even shorter than usual, for some reason. "What happens now?"

I shrugged. "Dunno." I coughed, winced, rubbed my throat. "New leader, maybe."

The bard's head perked up. "You?"

If I could, I would have laughed. A lot. " _Fuck_ , no."

Valen had spun at the sound of my voice, and now he was studying me, his eyes intent. "You are no ordinary cleric, are you?" he asked suddenly. "Ordinary clerics are granted spells only at the will of the Power they serve, but you? You wield divine power as if it were an extension of your own will." He wore an expression of dawning intrigue. "You are god-touched, aren't you? A mortal proxy, as they would call your kind in the Planes. It is the only explanation."

I stared back at him. _Explanation for what? And what the fuck's a proxy?_ I had no idea, but I did know that I was a woman with way too much on her mind to think about this stuff right now. After a moment, I shrugged, trying to convey without words that I didn't have the time or energy for a philosophical debate - although if there was a brandy and a smoke in it for me, I might be willing to humor him.

Valen studied me a few moments longer, his eyes searching my face as if he thought the mystery of Atlantis was in there somewhere. Then his eyes went to my feet, and he extended his hand, palm-up. "May I?"

I frowned at him in confusion until it occurred to me to look down at my feet, too. My shoulders slumped in resignation. No wonder everyone had looked so short – I was standing about two feet off the ground. "Thanks," I whispered, and accepted the hand down from my perch with as much aplomb as I could muster. His hand was warm and rough, heavily calloused from years of fighting, and his knuckles were criss-crossed with scars. "Sorry 'bout that."

Valen shrugged. "Don't be. " He let go of my hand once my footing had steadied, and gestured for me to walk ahead of him. "Lead on, air dancer," he said courteously, then ruined it a little by adding, "It is your turn to deal with those long-winded addle-coves. If I have to listen to them drone on one more time, I am going to stuff them all in Deekin's sack and throw them in the river."

I squinted at him. _Air dancer? Addle-coves? What?_ The man was almost as bad as me when it came to using funny words that nobody else understood. After a brief pause, in which I ended up even more confused than I started, I stopped trying and nodded and turned to the golems instead.

The rest could wait. I'd made a mess of the golems' lives. Now I was going to have to figure out how to clean it up.

* * *

The golem moaned in pain, but there wasn't much I could do about that. I'd tried to do this the easy way and put him to sleep with a word, but the command had just rolled right over the enchantments the Maker had built into him, so we were just going to have to do this the hard way – and with my mediocre skill at battlefield triage and my bag of herbal tricks gone, that was pretty friggin' hard.

I pulled the thread through the golem's skin one last time and knotted it off, clumsily because my hands were slippery with thick black golem blood. Luckily, the only golems who had any significant injuries were flesh golems. I wasn't sure what I'd do if somebody brought me one of those metal guys and asked me to figure out how to patch him up. Sit down and cry, probably.

A dribble of healing potion right into torn flesh closed a claw-wound in someone else's leg. Silently, I thanked Xanos for showing me that trick. The rest of the potion went down the next golem's throat, to heal a broken arm that my poor skills as a battlefield nurse weren't up to setting. Another potion sorted out some kind of massive internal bleeding which must have come about courtesy of Valen, going by the way my patient flinched whenever the tiefling looked his way. Another one had been clawed so deep that he was already in that dream-fugue state of near-death by the time his brothers brought him to me. I tried to heal him, since it wasn't like I could make things worse, but no matter what I tried he just kept slipping further and further away until he finally went and I had to go stare at the wall for a while and breathe really deep until the urge to sob hysterically had passed.

It was strange. At first, I hadn't really seen them as people. Now I was seeing them that way, and I couldn't unsee it, not even enough to save my own heart as I watched them die.

There was no water to wash my hands with, not down here. Just dust and grief. I did the best I could with the corner of a half-rotted tapestry.

Valen was leaning against the wall by the stairs. He was almost motionless except for a few tics that belied his seeming ease - the steady twitch of his tail, the brush of his thumb over the hilt of his flail, the nervous flexing of the fingers of his free hand. He had his head down, but was pretty obviously watching the golems from beneath his lashes, a wary frown firmly in place. Deekin was crouched next to him, flipping through his notes. They weren't talking, but neither were they trying to annoy each other to death. I didn't stop to question this strange providence, just trudged over and slid down the wall until I was sitting next to Deekin. I grunted a hello.

The little bard peered at me. "Hey, Boss. You look like _frrztlik_."

I grunted again, or tried to. I didn't know what _frrztlik_ looked like, but if it looked anything like I felt, then it was probably nothing good.

We sat. Deekin's quill scratched across the page. After a little while, I reached towards the quill and crooked my fingers in a 'give it here' motion. Deekin gave me a funny look, but handed over the quill. I took it, settled it in my hand, and wrote a splotchy, ' _Thanks'_ on the nearest corner of his journal, followed by a lopsided heart. I'd never really gotten the hang of writing with quills.

Deekin read my missive, grinned, and patted my forearm. "No problem, Boss," he said. "That what friends be for."

It was, but that didn't mean I didn't appreciate it. I wasn't used to having people care about me enough to shoot golems on my behalf. I didn't have the voice to say as much, though, so I draped an arm over the bard's shoulders and gave them a brief sideways squeeze.

The bard patted me again, absently. Then he peered up at me, sighed, and fished a relatively clean cloth out of that endless bag o' goodies of his. "Hold still," he instructed. Then he spit on the cloth, reached over, and started dabbing gently at a smear of blood on my cheek.

I was in the Underdark, surrounded by some duergar madman's experiments in artificial intelligence, and a three-foot-tall talking lizard was spit-cleaning my face like he was my mommy. Sighing, I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, and gave up trying to make sense of my life.

The kobold's fingers were gentle, his claws securely wrapped in cloth to keep them from scraping my skin. "You not use all your healing potions on the golems, right, Boss?" he asked sternly.

I shrugged.

Deekin gave me one of his patented 'Deekin be so disappointed in you.' looks. "Really, Boss?"

I shrugged again.

The bard sighed and produced a little blue vial from his bag. "Good thing you gots Deekin to think about these things." He handed the vial over. "Now, drink. You almost gots strangulated by an angry golem. You needs healing."

I needed to save what potions I had left for when I really needed them, not for fixing a few bumps and bruises that would heal fine on their own. I took the potion but didn't drink it.

Valen lifted his eyes. "Deekin is right. We are not yet out of danger, and even if your wounds are not severe, in a close fight, all it takes is a slight disadvantage to turn the tide."

 _Wonderful._ I turn my back for five minutes, and not only were these two agreeing on something, that something was ganging up on me – and I couldn't even argue with them, because my voice was gone. For lack of any better options, I grunted.

Valen looked at me sharply. "Can't you speak?" At my hangdog glare and headshake, he blinked in surprise. "Oh." He looked at Deekin. "How long do you think it will take her throat to heal?"

Deekin thought about it. "Days. Tendays, maybe."

The redhead's face turned speculative. "And…she will be unable to speak in the meantime?"

The kobold grinned and bobbed his head. "Not much, Deekin be thinking."

"I see." Valen turned back to me, poker-faced. "On second thought, perhaps you should save your potions."

My jaw dropped. Was he making fun of me? Another, more careful look at his face revealed a slight quiver at the corners of his lips. He _was_ making fun of me! I crossed my arms over my chest and glowered at him. I'd changed my mind: I'd liked him better _before_ he had a sense of humor.

Valen took advantage of my silence to study me a little longer. His eyes went to my bruised throat and lingered there. Then he started to frown, his mood shifting. "Speaking of speaking, what possessed you to goad Aghaaz like that? You had him so enraged, he would have killed you in an instant, if he could."

I pointed at my throat and made indignant gurgling noises.

Valen went on relentlessly, building up a head of steam as he went. "You are as reckless as a wildfire."

I tried to speak. No sound came out. This was torture. I grappled with the cork on the potion bottle.

"Not to mention as barmy as a Spire god."

What the hell did that even _mean_? And now the cork was stuck. Of course it would be. Of course.

And now the tiefling really had the bit in his teeth. "I have met goristros with a stronger sense of self-preservation than you. And _they_ volunteer as siege weapons."

Finally, the cork popped free. I threw back the potion in one gulp. "I was trying…to buy us time," I gasped as soon as I felt the pain in my throat ease, only now the healing magic was making my throat tingle like crazy and I had to force the rest of the words out in between eye-watering fits of coughing. "So Deeks…could get…reinforcements."

Valen's voice lowered to a soft growl. "I am not _saying_ you did not have your reasons to do as you did. I am _saying_ that you could at least have warned me about what you were going to do."

I goggled. "How was I supposed to warn you without warning Aghaaz?"

"You could have given _some_ sign," came his stubborn reply. "You could have trusted me."

I stared at him, my blood pressure suddenly rising so high I was pretty sure I was one more word from having the top of my head blow clean off. "Trusted you? You mean, like the way _you_ trust _me_?"

Valen's blue eyes went wide and his head reared back. He stared at me, speechless for once.

I bulldozed into his silence, too angry to stop myself. "You'd think you would have figured out by now that I'm on your side." My voice was bitter. We hadn't known each other long, but a whole lot of shit had happened in a pretty short time, and he'd been there for most of it, watching me come close to getting myself killed fighting a war I hadn't even started but was stuck finishing. "And, hey, I agree with you!" I went on wildly. "I think I'm the worst savior anyone could ask for! But I'm here and you need help, so I'll do my best, and maybe we'll all die horribly but it won't be because I betrayed you, it'll be because our enemy is the worst thing to hit this planet since the fucking thing formed in the first place!" Then I turned away and stared at nothing, my face set and my breath seething between my teeth.

Silence fell, broken only by a loud splat as a drop of ink fell from Deekin's quill onto his journal. The kobold jumped and wiped at the splotch, succeeding only in smearing it. "Er. Sorry. Deekin didn't catch all that. Could you-"

Power flared. My voice tore the air like a thunderclap. " _NO_."

Deekin flipped his journal shut, sat up very straight, and spoke very brightly. "Okie dokie."

Silence stretched out like taffy.

Eventually, a voice spoke. "Query. May we interrupt?"

My head whipped around. "Oh, thank f….er. I mean, yes? Can I help you?" My eyes focused on a pair of metal knees, and traced them up metal legs to a metal torso and, on top of it, a solemn metal face. I squinted. I didn't recognize this golem. "Wait. Who the hell are you?"

This golem was squatter and broader than Ferron, and his flesh, if you wanted to call it that, had the reddish sheen of copper, while his eyes were filled end-to-end with a steady emerald glow. "Greetings," he said. "I the hell am a member of the golem collective, autonomously selected designation: Cupron."

Deekin tugged on my sleeve. "Psst. That means his name is Cupron."

I gave Cupron a look Drogan would have recognized from his lectures on arcane theory – annoyed, slightly sheepish, and as out-of-my-element as a Loviatarite in a Sunite festhall. "Oh. So why didn't you just say that?"

Cupron looked at me just as blankly. "I just did." He straightened. "Before we engage in further social intercourse, I understand that it is customary to exchange designations. Query: What is your designation, please?"

Deekin spoke up, sotto-voce. "He wants to know what your name is."

 _Heh. He said intercourse._ I swallowed a snicker and said, "My name's Rebecca. Well met, Cupron."

Cupron bowed so stiffly it was like he had hinges in the place of hips. "It gives me pleasure to meet you, too, Rebecca," he said. His voice lowered, as if he was making a note. "Primary task completed. Secondary task initiated." Then he raised his voice and resumed talking to me as if he hadn't just interrupted the conversation to talk to himself. "After due discussion, my brothers have elected me to be one of two joint representatives, duly empowered to speak on behalf of our people. We have agreed, by a majority vote, to convey our thanks for your assistance. We have also agreed to honor Ferron's promise to you. We owe you a debt, and we feel that it is morally correct for us to aid you as you have aided us."

Wings rustled. "On the condition that you ask nothing of us that violates our moral precepts," another, lighter voice added. The black-skinned demon-flesh golem who'd spoken made a face, an activity for which he was amazingly well-equipped, since his face had more topographical features than a map of Thay. "Whatever those are, or will be." He bowed, rather less stiffly than Cupron. "Hello. I am Mhaat. We have met before, though I did not tell you my name." The golem ducked his head bashfully. "I apologize. I do not know how you other sentient beings do these things, but Cupron thinks I was very rude."

I found my voice. "Not really," I reassured him. "I mean, you kept Aghaaz from killing me. That was pretty polite of you."

Mhaat tilted his head almost owlishly, as if he was really mulling over my words. "Good," he decided at last. His wings drooped. "But I am sorry I did not act sooner."

I couldn't help but ask. "Why didn't you?

Mhaat sighed. "Aghaaz was my elder and my brother. I served him because I believed he only wanted to protect us and would never lie to us." His fiery orange eyes burned low, subdued. "Now, I am not so certain."

Aghaaz had tried to murder the shit out of me, which made it all the stranger to discover that I didn't really want to say all the things I could have said about him. Not to his family, at least. "I think he was trying to protect you," I said, after a long, pregnant pause. "In his way." _Before the pressure cooker of power and responsibility liquefied his sanity, anyway._

Mhaat frowned. "Was his way the correct way?"

Something about the golem's earnestness compelled me to give him an earnest answer. "I don't know, Mhaat." I'd been the one to bring about Aghaaz's death, albeit indirectly, and I still wasn't sure. And I supposed I was just going to have to live with that. Somehow. "I really don't."

Mhaat hunkered down, bringing his wings up over his head in a pensive and slightly disgruntled manner. "Life as a sentient being is more difficult than I ever imagined."

I sighed. "Tell me about it." Slapping my hands on my thighs, I stood. "So. Are we ready to go?"

Mhaat and Cupron both stared at me as if I'd said a naughty word. "Oh, no," Mhaat said. "We have a great deal of discussion and preparation to do before we may leave."

Cupron's copper face flowed into a new expression, one with downturned lips and downcast eyes. "Yes. It is appropriate to inform you that not all of our brethren will be coming with us." He sighed. "We must make arrangements for the safety of those who remain behind."

I stared. "What? Why aren't they coming?"

Mhaat shivered, wrapping his wings around himself so he looked kind of like a bat, albeit a bat who'd gotten into a terrible accident with a grain thresher. "Free will is a frightening gift," he rumbled. "Not all of us wish to keep it, especially now that we know the truth of the Maker."

I frowned, struggling to understand. "But…what'll happen to them? Are they just going to turn into regular golems?"

Cupron sighed. "Yes. Without the Power Source, their minds will dwindle and fade." Then he squared his stocky shoulders. "However, it is their right as free-thinking creatures to determine their own fates."

Mhaat nodded dejectedly. "Even if their decision is to give up that right."

Guilt caught me in its claws. They were talking about suicide. What had I done? I'd introduced the concept of self-annihilation to people who'd just been getting used to the idea of having a self in the first place. "Can't….can't you try to talk them out of it?"

Cupron bowed his head. "I will try. But I will not impose my will on my brothers, for this is the path that led to Aghaaz." He turned to Mhaat. "On that subject, we must determine an equitable sharing arrangement for the Power Source. It is our common need and should, I think, be our common burden."

Mhaat bobbed his head in eager agreement. "Quite. All of us should have access to it, perhaps for pre-determined periods of time."

"Agreed." The golems walked away, still talking. "Also, as you have mentioned time, I believe we must formulate an understanding of the ways in which sentient beings measure time, the better to establish our own system of measurement."

"Your proposal is reasonable. Shall we vote to add it to the agenda?"

"Affirmative."

I stared after them. Then I sat back down. "Are we in Hell?" I asked no one in particular.

Valen was rubbing his temples, as if he felt a headache coming on. "No," he said, his voice despairing. "Hell is more fun than this."


	34. Low

_A/N: Hiyaaaa! Who wants a new chapter? Aw, I know you do._

 _Do bear in mind, though: the Valsharess isn't Rebecca's real enemy. I felt we were due for a reminder of who we're truly up against._

 _So, a challenge to my readers: Can you spot him?_

* * *

 _"_ _Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle."_

\- Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_

 _Please allow me to introduce myself  
_ _I'm a man of wealth and taste  
_ _I've been around for a long, long year  
_ _Stole many a man's soul to waste_

 _Pleased to meet you  
_ _Hope you guess my name  
_ _But what's puzzling you  
_ _Is the nature of my game_

\- The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"

~*~  
Chapter 34: Low  
~*~

Golems rose up out of the Dark River. Water sheeted off of bright metal. Winged shapes circled overhead.

Valen and Deekin and I left the docks and entered the steep and winding streets of Lith My'athar. Golems formed up behind us, falling into a march.

A drow runner darted ahead of us, spreading word and reassuring the city that they didn't have to break out the defenses quite yet. All along the street, drow stopped to look, pausing in mid-conversation, drifting onto sidewalks and into roads, lizard-drawn carriages and slave-born litters slowing and then stopping, townsfolk leaning over balconies and even perching on statues in a way that was eerily reminiscent of the spiders they emulated, all to get a better view. I could feel their eyes on us. Not all of those stares felt friendly.

I glanced over my shoulder at the golems. They did look impressive. I'd never led an army before, not even a little one. It was kind of thrilling. "Think these guys'll make the difference?" I asked, not so much _at_ Valen as in his general vicinity. We hadn't spoken directly since our little argument in the Maker's lab. The whole thing was starting to feel a little silly, but hey, there were times when acting like an adult was highly overrated.

Valen shrugged. "It cannot hurt," he said tersely.

A knot in my shoulders half-undid itself at the sound of his silk-smoke voice, the same as if I'd just taken a slow drag on a good cigar. I watched him sideways. His face was taut. I couldn't tell if he was still stewing over what I'd said, or on edge for another reason. From the way his eyes and head moved, he was trying to keep tabs on every drow in sight – a near-impossible task, since drow were watching us from every angle and there was no way to know where an attack might come from, if it came. Maybe that was what was making him so tense. It was certainly making _me_ tense, but I wasn't the one who'd survived the Abyss. I'd have thought that his nerves would be steadier than mine. I was starting to wonder about that. "You don't seem convinced," I said at last.

The tiefling drew in a deep breath and rolled his shoulders, as if he was trying to force himself to relax. "To be honest with you, I am more concerned about the archdevil than her army," he said. "He may be the primary reason the Valsharess holds the power she does. If we could figure out how she controls him, and perhaps break that control...then we might have a chance."

Well, at least it was 'we' now. "I don't suppose archdevils like pies," I mused, thinking of Tymofarrar. "Do you think we could bribe him with pies to make him go away?"

Alarm flickered across Valen's face. "Hellfire, no." All at once, he stopped, turned, and grabbed me by the shoulders. "Please tell me you are not seriously considering dealing with an archdevil."

I blinked at him. "Are they that bad?"

"Let me put it this way. Where I come from, there are three rules for dealing with devils."

"Which are?"

"Don't, don't, and don't."

I started to laugh, looked at Valen's unsmiling face, and stopped. I couldn't quite tell whether he was serious or not. Frowning, I leaned sideways a little to see what his tail was up to. It was swishing back and forth in agitation. _Definitely serious._ I straightened. "Relax," I told him. "I was only joking."

He didn't relax. "Archdevils are no joking matter."

"Do you really think I'm crazy enough to try bargaining with an archdevil?"

"Do you really want me to answer that question?"

My jaw clenched. "Oh. Go ahead. Make my day."

His tail lashed. "Fine. You would like my opinion? Have my opinion. I do not think you are crazy, but I _do_ think you are impulsive. And that you will go out of your way to court danger when the mood seizes you."

My nostrils flared. "Excuse me, who is it here whose first response to a drow ambush was to _charge_ _right into it_?"

Valen stiffened. "That is different."

"Oh, _really_?" I drawled haughtily, crossing my arms over my chest. "How is it different? Enlighten me."

"I have fought drow before. I knew what I was getting into, and I knew that I could handle it."

"So you're saying that I can't handle this?"

Valen rolled his eyes. "I said no such thing, so kindly refrain from putting words in my mouth," he snapped back. "Since I have met you, I have seen you go toe-to-toe with a plaguebearer otyugh, I have seen you wield wind and lightning so effortlessly that if I did not know better I would take you for a djinni, and after being on the receiving end of your tongue I am certain that it is effectively impossible to intimidate you into _not_ speaking your mind, so whatever else you are, you are certainly not helpless _."_

My mouth fell open. I tried to process all of that. "So…wait. You're saying you think I _can_ handle myself?"

Valen snorted. "Of course you can. With your instinct for trouble, if you could not hold your own in a fight, you would have put yourself in the dead book a long time ago."

"Oh." I stared at him. The diffuse light of Lith My'athar made his eyes look darker, closer to sapphires than aquamarines, and it made his skin look almost luminous. "Um. Then why are we arguing?"

Valen stared at me. His forehead furrowed slightly. "I…am no longer entirely sure."

A throat cleared, or at least, someone with a really metallic, echo-ey voice made a sound like a throat clearing. "Excuse me?"

Valen and I both turned our heads. "What?" he snapped, bristling.

Cupron looked at us. "Is there a problem? We appear to have stopped moving."

Way later than I really should have, I realized that we were standing in the middle of the street. The golems were arrayed behind us, a few confused murmurs rippling through their ranks . I looked back at Valen, who had gone slightly red around the ears. My lips twitched a little before I got them under control. "I think we're confusing your new army, General."

Valen shot me an unreadable look. " _My_ army?" he repeated, half-under his breath. He looked at his hands, still holding me by the shoulders, and blinked. He let me go, his face coloring further. "No, there is no problem, Cupron," he said, demonstrating that he was actually a pretty good liar. "Let's just keep moving."

We walked the rest of the way in silence. Valen didn't seem to be any mood to talk further, and neither was I. I felt drained, depressed, and jittery, all at once. It was as if I was coming down from a high. I needed something to soothe me. Automatically, my hand went to my belt, where my hip flask should have been. Then I remembered that the Valsharess had stolen it, and my mood got just that much worse.

We reached the temple and came to a stop. Heavy footsteps rippled to a halt behind us. People were already waiting for us outside the temple – Nathyrra, the Seer, and, hovering behind the Seer's shoulder like he was trying to hide, Lomylithrar.

The Seer approached us, smiling. "Valen, Rebecca," she greeted us, and gave us both a kiss on the cheek and a squeeze of our hands in hers. "Well returned." She turned her attention to Cupron and Mhaat, her white eyebrows arching. "And these must be our new allies, of whom I have recently heard a great deal." Valen's messenger was standing next to her, looking a little out of breath.

Cupon bowed. "My name is Cupron," he said, proving that, if nothing else, he was a fast learner. "You must be the Seer. I greet you, both on my behalf and on behalf of my brethren, who have agreed, after much discussion-"

My eyes crossed, and my brain shut down in self-defense, tuning out the rest of the golem's greeting. The Seer was welcome to listen. Maybe she'd have better luck figuring out whatever the fuck these guys were saying.

A hand touched my shoulder lightly, making me jump. Valen jerked his hand back. "I beg your pardon. I did not mean to startle you."

Apparently, Valen wasn't the only one who was feeling a little on-edge. "It's fine," I said, not really sure whether I was trying to reassure him or myself. "I'm just..." I didn't really know how to explain it. "I'm fine."

Valen's eyes narrowed. "If you are fine, then I am a faerie princess."

At that, I had to smile. "They must grow big faeries wherever you're from. Your Highness."

His answering smile was so tiny and abbreviated it was practically a comma. "Go rest, Windwalker," he ordered, and it _was_ an order, spoken in the General's voice and leaving no room for discussion. "We must plan our next move, but we need not do so immediately. The Valsharess will not descend on us right this instant, and right this instant, you look dead on your feet." He gestured at the golems. "I must see to our new allies, but I…" He cleared his throat. The General's voice went away, and then it was just Valen's voice, soft and strangely tentative. "I would like to speak with you. When you next have a moment."

He probably just wanted to start that planning he'd mentioned, but I couldn't think about that right now. To see that golem army standing in front of me brought home how real this all was. War was coming, and I didn't feel even remotely ready for it. Mostly, I just wanted to crawl into bed and pull the blankets over my head and stay there until all of this went away. "All right. Fine."

The tiefling nodded at me and turned away without another word, moving to join Cupron and the Seer. I felt dismissed. I turned to Deekin, who was hovering nearby, scribbling in his little journal. "Deeks?" I asked. "You gonna come with me, stay here, or what?"

The kobold barely looked up from his notes, though he did spare me a wave of his quill. "You go on, Boss. Deekin gonna stay here. Gotta take all this down. He catch up later."

And now I'd been doubly dismissed. Multiply, if you counted the Seer and Nathyrra and everyone else, who were all gathered around the golems in fascination and ignoring me entirely.

Scowling, I settled Enserric more firmly on my shoulder and tramped through the temple doors. _Everybody just ignore the human,_ I brooded. _She's just a dumb human, only speaks one language, had to be told what a tiefling is - Hells, she can't even see in the dark. It's not like she almost killed herself getting you your shiny new army or anything._

I just about walked into Lomylithrar on the way in, and had to jerk to a stop to avoid knocking him on his skinny avariel butt. Someone, I saw, had bandaged his wing stumps in linen and found him a clean white robe and a new pair of shoes. Nonetheless, it was still hard to look at him and not remember how cruelly he'd once smiled. "Oh," I said, intelligently. "Uh. Hi."

The avariel's face blanched. Tears filled his eyes. "W-windwalker," he said. He gave me a jerky bow. "Excuse me. I…I need to…excuse me." Then he backed away from me, and as soon as he was a polite distance away, he fled down the hall.

I stared after him and sighed. _So now I'm spooking traumatized avariel._ _Great. Just great. Is it time for my nap?_ I stomped down the hall, wondering if there really were thunderclouds over my head or if it just felt that way.

The room the Seer had given me was quiet, and someone had apparently come in and tidied up while I was gone. The singed carpet was gone, the bed was made, and the clothes I'd left there had even been washed and neatly folded, which was nice. I had enough on my mind. Somebody else was welcome to take care of the laundry.

I sat down. The room was empty and echoing. There were no windows, and the walls and floors and ceiling were all marble. Even with the rugs and tapestries and softly glowing brazier, the room felt chilly. It felt like a crypt.

I shivered. Then I sprang up again, grabbed Enserric, and left.

My wandering footsteps eventually brought me to the back of the temple, where the Seer's quarters lay. There was a drow on the guard at the door. He looked at me, then nodded me through without a word.

The Seer's sitting room was marble and windowless, like the rest of the temple, but somehow it felt warmer than my chamber, maybe because it had a more lived-in feeling to it. The sofa table held messy stacks of books and papers, which had gradually started to overflow the table, creep onto one of the chairs, and begin filling the seat. There was a tray on another table, holding a teapot with an array of clean teacups and a couple of stone jars standing next to it. A book lay open on the sofa, with a silk cord to mark the page, and a blanket was haphazardly draped over the sofa's back, as if somebody had been sitting cuddled up in that blanket not that long ago.

I looked around. I didn't really know why I'd come here, but now that I was here, I didn't really want to leave. The Seer's quarters felt safe, in a way the rest of this place didn't.

I trudged across the room, shed my armor and undercoat, laid them carefully to one side, and stretched out on the sofa with Enserric propped in easy reach and my legs draped over the sofa's arm. It wasn't the most comfortable position, but I was too damn tall and the sofa was too damn short for anything else. Besides, I didn't want to get my dirty boots all over the Seer's nice clean upholstery. I'd already ruined one of her carpets.

Sighing, I laid my arm over my face. I wasn't tired, but it wouldn't hurt to close my eyes, just for a little bit….

When I opened my eyes again, there was a blanket draped over me and a smell of freshly brewed herbal tea in the air.

I heard a very soft _snik,_ the sound of a book's page turning. I turned my head. The Seer swam into focus. She was sitting on the other sofa, her ever-present teacup in her hand and a book open on her lap. When I looked at her, she smiled. "Welcome back, Rebecca," she said in her soothing voice. "How do you feel?"

My eyes felt sandy. I rubbed them. "Fine."

The Seer's face went politely neutral. "Of course." She gestured with her teacup, somehow not spilling a drop. "If you should happen to be in need of rest, however, you are welcome to stay here as long as you like." She touched her forefinger to her lips. "I shall be as quiet as a dreaming tree, I promise you."

I smiled in spite of myself at the Seer's whimsy. Did trees even dream? If so, what did they dream of? Sun? Rain? Other trees? Did they have nightmares of woodpeckers? "No," I said. "That's all right. Thank you." I pulled my legs down from the sofa's arm and sat up, stretching and covering a yawn with my hand. "I ran into Lomyth…Lomylth…" My tongue rebelled as I tried to make it pronounce all of those fancy elven syllables. "Gah, forget it. I ran into Lomy on the way here. How is he doing?"

The Seer sighed. "Calmer, but still in deep pain. I pray that he will be able to forgive himself, in time. For now, we must be patient."

 _Lady, if you expect patience out of me, you're gonna have a real long wait._ Grimacing, I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees and both hands on the back of my neck, kneading away the ache that had settled there. "I'm glad you're here to take care of him, anyway," I mumbled. "I wouldn't even know what to do with him."

The Seer smiled. "Listen."

I knitted my eyebrows and looked up. "What?"

The Seer set her book and teacup aside and stood. "If a wound of the body is infected, it must be purged," she explained, crossing over to the teapot on its tray. With one hand delicately placed over the teapot's lid, she poured. Dark golden tea formed a perfect arc from spout to cup. "The same rule holds for wounds of the mind, or the heart, or the soul. Lomylithrar is badly wounded. While he is no longer infected by the Lady of Poison, he is infected by his own remorse and the memory of what he did in her name, and the loss of his old life and Aerdrie's favor have left him stricken by grief. To purge his pain, he must confront it, give it voice." She shrugged. "And for that, all he needs is a willing ear."

My eyebrows straightened long enough to lift skeptically. "That's all?"

The Seer nodded. "That is all." Crossing the room, she placed the freshly-poured teacup in front of me, nodded at my mumbled 'thanks', then returned to her seat. "Have you noticed how thoughts which are painful will grow less painful when shared with another?" she asked, picking up her teacup once more.

I cradled my teacup in my hands and breathed in chamomile-scented steam. I usually tried _not_ to talk about the really painful thoughts, but I thought I knew what she was getting at. "So what you're really saying is that he has to talk it out before he can walk it out?

The Seer laughed a silvery little laugh. "That is one way to put it, I suppose," she agreed. "With time and compassion, even the most terrible thoughts can be spoken aloud. Then they become no more than an echo, and like an echo, they diminish." She cast her free hand upwards as if releasing a bird. "The rest is only healing, and most of the time, that is simply a matter of placing the newly diminished pain in perspective."

I wondered if this was how she'd been helping Valen – by listening to his memories of the Abyss until they grew small enough and weak enough that he could wrestle them into a cage and lock it tight. "What kind of perspective?"

The Seer studied me, her midnight blue eyes thoughtful. "I would like to answer your question with another question. May I?"

I took a pensive sip of tea and sighed gratefully as the sweet scent of flowers filled my nose and mouth and warmed my bones. "Go ahead."

"Do you blame Lomylithrar for what he did when the mirror twisted him?"

I frowned in thought. "N-no. Not really." The circumstances of our first meeting made everything amazingly awkward now, and I had no idea how to fix that, but… "It wasn't his fault he got hit by that spell."

The Seer nodded. Her face was sad. "And yet, all of the blame you will not lay on him he will lay on himself, and more besides, because he cannot believe that he deserves even that compassion which those he has wounded will gladly afford him," she said. She shook her head. "So often, I find that those who have suffered, especially those who have committed wrongs in the past, will save all of their compassion for others and spare none for themselves. I think that part of the healer's task is to help the wounded one see themselves from the perspective of others – as a person worthy of compassion."

I digested that. "And the other part?"

"The other part is to give context to suffering." The Seer gestured around us. "This room is small, bounded. From this space, the outside world is difficult to perceive, even though it exerts its influence on us in a thousand different ways. Pain works much the same way. It becomes all that we know. We retreat into it, to a place where Eilistraee's light cannot reach us, nor hope, nor truth, nor joy."

I shifted in my seat. "Okay, I see what you're saying. But aren't you afraid that one day you'll help a person who's done really horrible things, and they'll forgive themselves without really figuring out what they did wrong, and then they'll just go do more horrible things?"

The Seer lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "So far, I have found that if someone has come to me for help, it is because they are seeking redemption, not forgiveness. But I see your point. We cannot bury our mistakes, or we shall never learn from them." She pursed her lips. "The best any of us can hope for, I think, is to allow our past to inform us without defining us."

I grimaced. "Easier said than done."

The Seer tilted her head thoughtfully. "In some ways, yes," she agreed. Then she smiled. "In others, no. It is rather like healing. A healer does not force the body to do anything contrary to its nature. Rather, she coaxes it to do what is natural, out of turn. Her art takes place on a stage not of her design, but it is she who sets the script, and that is what makes the difference."

That sounded like a whole lot of bullshit to me. "I hadn't thought about it that way," I said, with what I thought was admirable tact. Then I grimaced. "Maybe 'cause I'm not much of a healer, myself."

The Seer's gaze was sympathetic. "Will you allow me to offer you a new perspective?"

I took another sip of tea, then waved my cup at her. "Go right ahead."

"When a limb is dying from infection and threatens to take the rest of the body with it, what can a healer do?"

"I don't know." I didn't know if many healers could save a patient's limb once the flesh started rotting, but I knew I hadn't met any who could. "Cut it off, I guess."

The Seer persisted gently. "But is that not destruction?"

I shook my head. "Not if it saves the person's life," I argued. "If it saves their life, it's healing."

"True, yet you are also injuring this person and causing them great pain."

I snorted. "Sorry, but I find it hard to believe that killing people is the same thing as healing them."

The Seer inclined her head. "True. The ones you have killed are dead, and are not the better for it, that much is true. But what of the lives that would have been lost or destroyed, and are now preserved due to your actions?"

Somehow, I knew we weren't talking in the abstract any longer. She must have gotten a full report from the golems and Valen while I was counting sheep. "Yeah, but was this really the only way to save them?"

The Seer spread her hands. "That, alas, is a question for wiser heads than mine. I do not know." Her calm midnight eyes met mine. "What I do know is that by choosing to cut out the rot that was threatening to destroy all of the Maker's children, you have earned the gratitude and friendship of the survivors, and gained us several formidable allies against the Valsharess."

I looked down into my tea. "Then why do I feel like a terrible person?" I hadn't killed Aghaaz, but it wasn't for lack of trying, and I _had_ killed other golems and plunged the rest into a big, scary world, chock-full of enemies and totally devoid of instruction manuals.

The Seer was silent. Then silk rustled. Slender fingers cupped my cheek. Too surprised to resist, I allowed the Seer to turn my face to hers. She smiled at me. She was kneeling at my feet in a graceful pool of white skirts, heedless of my dirty boots. "Because in the past you have both suffered and caused suffering," she told me. "And that suffering has honed your conscience into a blade so keen that you will bury it in your own heart before you will allow yourself the same compassion you will give to others."

My cheeks burned. "I'm not a nice person," I protested. "I lose my temper. I say things I don't mean." Valen's words came back to me. "I take dumb risks. I don't think-"

With one hand still on my cheek, the Seer leaned forward and kissed the other cheek. "Nice is not the same as good," she whispered in my ear. "And good is not the same as perfect." Then, with a light pat on my cheek, she let me go. She plucked the empty teacup from my nerveless hands and gave me a warm smile. "More tea?"

I stared after her, my hand still upraised, cradling a phantom teacup. Eventually, I found my voice. "What do you even need _me_ for?" I croaked. The woman was a damned mind-reader. She could probably engage in psychological warfare against an archdevil and win.

The Seer returned from her teapot and placed a refilled cup gently in my hands. "We are all needed," she said, her voice comforting. "I am no great power, my dear. My goddess and my many years in this world allow me to perceive things others may miss, that is all." She straightened, and her voice firmed. "But sight alone wins no wars. Nor does strength-of-arms, or cunning, or the ability to win allies."

I cleared my throat. Multiple times. "So what does?"

The Seer smiled. "All of those things together, plus faith, friendship, and hope."

My heart sank, unconsoled. I had some faith, but little hope, and few friends here in the dark. If the Seer wanted a savior, she was looking in the wrong place.

As soon as it was polite, I finished my tea, thanked the Seer, gathered my things, and left.

In the dark quiet of my chamber, I undressed, then stood in front of the mirror, wondering what the Seer saw in me that I didn't.

I saw a scarred, unsmiling woman, past the first blush of her youth but not yet old. She'd been softer, once, with her skin all but unbroken. Now, her body was all sinew and scars, and getting more scarred by the day.

The round white pucker in my left shoulder, just below my collarbone – that had been a bullet, and the first of my scars. The puckered line across the upper swell of my right breast was courtesy of Heurodis and her dagger. My gaze descending, I saw mottled patches of skin all along my left side and arm, reminders of an avalanche that had dragged me over the mountain before burying me in snow. Three jagged lines across my ribs were a souvenir of my time in that lich-infested oasis in the Anauroch. Those had come from a gargoyle's claws, and I would have had a lot worse than them if that plucky little Bedine chick hadn't had the inspiration to throw her scimitar down the gargoyle's gullet.

The stab wound in my left calf – that had been J'Nah. A gouge in the meat of my right calf had been torn by a bandit's arrow. Four irregular holes in the meat of my right forearm were a memento of an encounter with a very big tree snake in the jungles of Chult, which I'd survived only thanks to Farghan's training and Drogan's caution to always, always keep an antitoxin in my potions pouch.

Then there was the most recent addition, a wide and ragged pink scar across my lower ribcage, not quite a bite and not quite a gash, given to me by an otyugh's tentacle. And, on top of those, there were dozens of little white nicks and gouges, plus the little round scars, visible only if you knew what you were looking for, that traced the veins along the tender inner side of my forearms – the chronicle of my life, carved into my skin.

I supposed that scars meant I'd survived the things that had scarred me, that I'd healed, but that lesson was hard to remember, when all I could see were the marks of damage done.

I lifted my eyes. Behind my reflection, Enserric's obsidian blade sucked in the light like Silent Partner's zalantar. Unlike Silent Partner, it spat the light back out in a shimmer as bright and red as arterial blood.

I stared at my own war-torn reflection. Then I shuddered, turned away, and crawled into bed, drawing the sheets up over my head so I couldn't see the mirror or Enserric or, in fact, anything at all.

* * *

I dreamed I was in a forest.

Leaves rustled in the wind. The smell of evergreens filled the air. Patches of sun and shadow joined, shifted, and broke apart, like the patterns in a kaleidoscope. Somewhere, a stream burbled.

I looked around. _I know this place._ I had been here before. It was a sacred place - a place of thought and memory, yet somehow more real than real could be, and sketched in almost painful clarity. I could count the needles on the ground and the leaves in the trees and trace far-off wisps of cloud, glimpsed through the gaps in the canopy.

Try as I might, though, I couldn't see myself. I turned and turned, but as sharp as every other detail was, I was a blur to my own eyes.

Giving up, I cocked my head and looked around. My eyes could see far, and everywhere I could see, I was alone.

Then, all at once, I wasn't.

Noise grew. It sounded like hooves, like claws, like wings, and I turned my head to see where it was coming from.

The forest had come alive.

Beasts of all kinds surged through the sun-dappled shadows under the trees. Hawks screamed. Sparrows darted. Crows flapped. Mice skittered. Foxes slinked. Wolves prowled. Deer loped. Boar trotted. It was as if the whole forest was suddenly on the move.

Shapes emerged from the brush not far from my perch. A red tail flicked, and green eyes glanced up at me, bright with mischief. A blackbird with a copper band on her ankle swooped around it, singing. I knew them, somehow, though I couldn't quite remember how. Both were marked by a glowing sign, like a brand on their skin – a pointing hand, surrounded by stylized swirls of wind. The mark glowed now blue, now white, like the sky glimpsed through a keyhole.

The fox and the blackbird left, but more animals came, all marked with the hand-and-winds. There was a rangy grey wolfhound, and a sleek black panther that slithered like a shadow through the trees, and a rainbow finch which looked like it really had been dip-dyed in all the colors of the rainbow – marked, marked, and marked. And after them came still more, creatures numbering in the hundreds, maybe even the thousands, all of them marked the same and yet no two quite alike.

Beneath my tree, a squat shape scurried across the ground, pine needles crunching under its feet. It was a wolverine, gold-furred and black-eyed and covered in old battle scars. It looked up at me and seemed to grin, showing sharp gold teeth. I looked back, knowing it for a friend, without knowing how I knew. It had a brand-mark on its shoulder, too, only there was something a little bit different about this one, because _this_ hand held a staff, and there was a snake wrapped around it.

 _Healer,_ I thought. That was what the marking meant, though I didn't know how I knew that, either.

The wolverine snuffled the air. Then, with a jerk of its head that seemed to command me to follow, it lumbered after the other animals.

The flood of beasts dwindled. The forest got quieter, though not quiet.

In the hush, an owl alighted next to me, her toes gripping the grizzled pine-bark branch. She stared at me with her huge yellow eyes and hooted, and I didn't know her but, at the same time, I did, because something in her sang to the same thing in me, like to like, storm to storm, and when I looked, she wore the hand, too, only this hand held something else - an open eye, set into its palm.

 _Seer,_ I thought, or maybe, _Guide,_ the two thoughts blending together so I couldn't quite tell them apart.

The owl looked at me and hooted in a way that sounded like laughter, then ghosted away on noiseless wings, following the others.

I watched her go, and watched others pass, too – ones like me and her and the wolverine. A grizzly bear lumbered beneath my tree, the hand-mark on its shaggy shoulder holding a shield. _Protector._ And there, a raven flapped from tree to tree, marked with a hand-and-quill. _Scribe,_ said a part of me, and, _Clerk,_ said another.

Then I heard hoofbeats, slow and stately, and turned my head to look.

A stag was picking its way across the forest to me. It was an elegant beast, snow-white, with a reaching crown of antlers. The mark on its shoulder was a hand with an open mouth above it, only sometimes the mouth was also a pair of wings.

 _Voice_ , I thought, and at the same instant, as if the two thoughts were one and the same, I thought: _Messenger._

The white stag looked up at me. Its eyes were lichen-green, its expression calm and somehow amused. _Well?_ I thought I heard it say.

I stared at it. _Well, what?_

The stag heaved a long-suffering sigh. _Time is wasting, little sister. Are you coming with us?_

I hadn't really thought about it, but now that I did, the answer seemed obvious. _Of course I am,_ I retorted, and fluttered down to the offered perch. I'd barely gotten a good grip on an antler before the stag lurched into motion.

The landscape blurred – trees, plains, mountains, sand, surf, and trees again. Eventually, the stag came to a stop, and I surveyed our new surroundings. We'd come to a clearing. It was grassy and wide, with a deep blue pond reflecting a perfect mirror image of the sky and the trees and the beasts.

My stately ride paced to the pond and lowered his head, his flanks heaving and breath steaming in the chilling air.

Automatically, I looked down and saw my own reflection.

A fierce-eyed bird looked back at me. It had speckled feathers, a beak like a butcher's hook, and glossy black talons that glittered with tiny pinpoints of red, like strange stars in a stranger sky.

I stared, unable to look away. It – _I_ \- was marked, too, only the hand on me was a bloody fist, and it was clutching something, a jagged and angry thing that looked a little like a lightning bolt and a little like a….

The meaning of the mark I bore came to me all at once, just like all the others.

 _Sword,_ and an echo of meaning followed it, same-but-not-quite: _Storm._

A furious shriek pealed across the clearing, and in a thrust of wings, I was up in the air, flying into the gathering clouds, trying to outrace that blood-soaked reflection.

There was lightning raking the sky. _You cannot outrun yourself, child,_ it told me. _You are as you are._

Cold fury drove my wingbeats. _Bullshit. You_ made _me what I am._

The wind was a far-off howl. _No,_ it replied _. I found you._

Sleet pelted me. _You should have left me._

The wind was relentless in its patience. _Your soul cried out to me to free you – the soul of my own child, in my own nature shaped. How could I leave you?_

I cried out now. _You should never have listened._

The wind chided me. _I raised you up._

 _I belong in the dirt._

The wind rose to a roar. **_Enough_** _, child. There is no evil in what you are._ The wind faded to a whisper. _Only in what you do._

 _Fine._ In that case, what I was going to do was to fly, as hard and fast as I could, and find a place where there were no mirrors.

The world flashed. A mountain rose. Pinkish-grey rock spilled down its sides, and on its highest peak, a stone dais stood, open to the sky.

I folded my wings and dove like a comet. The ground rose up to meet me. At the last second, some instinct made me flare my wings and pull up and out of my stoop, reaching out for a standing stone.

The stone was pierced through with holes. Wind whistled through them, making a wild and lonely music.

I looked around. I was on a mountaintop, pink-stoned, with a ribbon of a river and a sea of trees stretching out at the mountain's feet. _I know this place, too._ This was where everything had changed. _Why am I here?_

The memory of a voice answered my voiceless question. _You yearn to see the beauty of the world._

The valley stretched out before me. I thought I could stay there forever, just drinking in the view. _I do._

The valley darkened. Fire flickered. _The cruelty and injustice of the world makes you angry._

The fire grew. I seethed at the sight of it. _It does._ Not that I had any real power to change it.

Cool white light flickered on the standing stone. A woman's voice spoke. _You have the power to_ _ **act**_ _._

The forest flared orange before cooling to barren black.

Nothing moved.

Then, in the silence, something _did_ move, something so tiny that even my eyes could only catch it because it was the only sign of life in that dead place - a single green leaf, shouldering its way up through the ashes.

Then another, and another, and soon there were happy little baby trees everywhere, all reaching for the sunlight.

Fluffing my feathers against the brisk chill of the mountain air, I perched on Shaundakul's throne and watched as the forest grew again in the sunset light, my fury fading. The warmth and peace of the living world was like a balm to my soul, and it seemed like everything was unfurling as it should.

The woman's voice spoke again, serene as a midnight sky. _When a limb begins to die, and threatens to take the body with it, what can a healer do?_

In the forest below, something else was coming up from the ground, only this one wasn't green and yearning for the sun, it dripped venom and _wrongness_ and everything it touched, died.

My talons flexed hungrily. That _thing_ had to be stopped. That _thing_ had to die. Without actually thinking about it, I leapt back into the sky, reaching for a lightning cloud.

Then, just before I could reach the storm, something heavy and dark passed over me. I hadn't noticed it, not with my eyes fixed on that _thing_ on the ground, and now my mistake only came clear when the strange dark thing knocked me right out of the sky.

Screaming in helpless fury, I fell. The sky tumbled past me, then trees, then stone, then darkness.

I couldn't see anything, couldn't feel anything. I tried to move. _Too cold_. It was as cold as winter's heart in this place, but then I saw that there were eyes in the dark, and they _burned_.

Terror took me in its grip, and I froze – helpless, shivering - as the burning eyes began to turn to me.

Then, before those eyes could see me, a shadow swept around me like a cloak, sheltering me from view. _Ssshh,_ it hushed me. _Ssshh, my child, be still, be still._

I huddled in the warmth of that shadow, fighting to hold utterly still, while outside of my shelter, slow hoofbeats hit the ground with a sound like the breaking of the world.

The hoofbeats plodded slowly past. Then they paused. I could hear breathing, deep and even and rasping, and I could see the reflection of fiery eyes, panning over my hiding place like searchlights.

In the dark, I waited, panic rising like a scream.

Then, after what felt like forever, the fiery eyes turned away, and the hoofbeats faded, and…

…and I woke up with a gasp, my heart hammering and my body drenched with sweat.

The palm of my left hand itched. I heaved upright. "Enserric," I gasped.

A red glow lit the dark, like a distant galaxy. "I am here, my wielder."

I flung the sheets back and rose, almost falling in my haste. My hand _– a hand, not talons, just a human hand -_ closed on a silk-wrapped hilt. "Are we alone?"

Enserric pulsed for a moment. "Yes."

That should have been reassuring, but it wasn't. I stood and shivered, hugging my arms around my middle. _God. Those eyes._ The memory of them sent a shudder all the way through me, head to toe, skin to bone, and it was only the memory of that sheltered shadow that kept me from screaming.

"I can't take this," I said abruptly. My voice shook. Guided by the faint red light coming from my sword, I groped my way through the darkened room, found my clothes, yanked them on and fumbled for the doorknob. It took me three tries to turn it.

The hall was quiet and deserted except for two drow – Quarra, this time with Izoleth, the rebel's wizard-in-chief. He was a full head and shoulders shorter than Quarra, slender as a reed, with burgundy eyes and a triangular face that put me in mind of a fruit bat. He raised an eyebrow at me, then nodded calmly, as if he wasn't actually standing guard outside my bedroom door while everybody else was asleep. Quarra looked at me a little disdainfully before shrugging and going back to sharpening one of her daggers.

 _This has to be Valen's doing._ I felt a little burr of irritation, then a little flicker of warmth followed by an even bigger burr of irritation. _What am I that I need this kind of security, Fort fucking Knox?_

Ignoring the drow, I padded to the door across the hall and knocked, wishing it didn't sound so tentative. "Deeks?" I whispered. I winced. Even at a whisper, my voice sounded altogether too loud in the quiet hall. "Are you awake?"

For the longest time, there was no answer. Then the doorknob turned and the door creaked open, revealing a wrist-thick sliver of golden candlelight. Deekin peered out and then up, blinking. "What is it, Boss?" he asked. His eyes darted up and down the hall. "What be wrong? Did something happen?"

I swallowed. "Nothing, I just…c-can I come in? Please?"

Deekin looked up at me for a second. Then he nodded and opened the door to let me through. "You don't gotta ask twice, Boss."

I restrained a relieved sigh. "Thanks, Deeks," I said, and slipped into the bard's room before he could change his mind.

Three steps later, I stubbed my toe on a small ziggurat of gold ingots. "Shit biscuits!" I yelled. I staggered and fell against a side table, which made a distinctly un-table-like rattling noise and showered my feet with more things, all of them hard and sparkly. Since standing obviously wasn't working out so well for me, I sat on the floor. Then I yelled again, surged up, yanked a wand-of-something-or-other out from under my ass, flung it aside, then went back to clutching my foot and cursing. A little ways into the exercise, I finally bothered to look around me. The place looked like a merchant's stall had exploded. "What the-"

Deekin hurried over and scooped some papers out of my way. "Sorry, Boss," he said cheerfully. "Deekin was just cataloguing the stuff we got from the Maker's place."

I looked up. There was a halberd on the credenza. "Right," I said faintly. "And this all fit in your bag?"

"Sure." Deekin set about stacking the papers I'd kicked when I'd walked into his stash of precious metals. "It not really be a bag, though. It be more like a bag-shaped portal to a pocket plane."

I blinked. "A pocket plane? Is that where pocket lint comes from?"

Deekin gave me a long look. Then he sighed. "No, Boss. That not be where pocket lint comes from."

"Oh." That was vaguely disappointing. It would have explained so many things. I bent over my foot again, rocking back and forth slightly. "Ow. Fuck. Ow. Shit. Ow. Balls."

The bard finished re-organizing his papers, then crouched down and looked at me rock back and forth and curse for a minute before he spoke again. "Hey, uh, Boss?"

"Ow. Crap on a…yeah?"

"You know you gots your shirt on backwards?"

I looked down. "Huh. So I do." I looked up again. "Guess that explains why Quarra was looking at me funny." I caught the bard's amused little grin and huffed in annoyance. "Give me a break, Deeks. I'm a human in the Underdark. I can't see shit."

The bard's grin faded into a look of contrition. "Sorry, Boss. Deekin keeps forgetting."

I blinked. "How do you forget that I'm human?"

Deekin shrugged. "It not so much that Deekin forgets. He just not think about it much. You be Deekin's friend. The rest just be details, and Deekin never been good with details." He studied me a little more, his expression softening with concern. "What's the matter, Boss? Bad dreams?"

I paused. Then, shivering, I wrapped both arms around my shins and hugged my knees to my chest. "Yes. No. I don't know."

Deekin nodded. "Want to talk about it?"

My chest felt tight and my nerves felt like jelly. "Not really. I just…" I trailed off, embarrassed, then blurted, "I just couldn't sleep and didn't want to sit alone in the dark, okay?"

Deekin nodded again. "O-kay." He looked at my face, his snout suddenly scrunching up in a frown. When he reached out and brushed the back of a finger against my cheek, his finger came away damp. "Hey," he chided gently. "It be okay, Boss. Really. Dreams can't hurt you."

I laughed hollowly. "Yes, they can."

Deekin sighed. "Fine. Have it your way, Boss." He sat down next to me. "Hey, Deekin gots an idea."

I scrubbed at my eyes with the back of my hand. "What's that?"

"How about Deekin tells you a story until you feels sleepy again?"

Unbidden, a smile crept to my lips. "Okay." Taking a deep breath, I unwrapped one arm from around my shins and draped it over the kobold's skinny shoulders, hugging him to my side. The tightness in my chest began to ease. "What kind of story?"

Deekin smirked. "That be for the storyteller to know and you to find out." He settled in a little more comfortably, tapping his forefinger against his little horned chin in thought. "Now, let's see. Once upon a time…"


	35. Trust

_A/N: *zips by, hits 'post'*_

 _Here's another long chapter for y'all. I couldn't figure out how to split it without losing momentum, especially as the whole thing is linked thematically, but I'm sure you'll forgive me by the time you reach the end. xoxo_

* * *

 _What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?_

\- George Eliot, _Middlemarch_

 _I know that each one of us travels to live alone, alone to faith and to death. I know it. I've tried it. It doesn't help. Let me come with you._

\- Giannis Ritsos

~*~  
Chapter 35: Trust  
~*~

A scratching at my door jerked me out of a dead sleep.

I opened my eyes. Silk sheets were tangled around me. I fought them off and sat up. "Whozzat?" I yelled, still half-asleep.

A familiar voice cut through the door like a diamond saw through glass. "It be me, Boss," Deekin called. "Can I come in?"

I looked around. There was no way to tell the time in this forsaken place, but it felt like I'd only managed to crawl back in here and get to sleep five minutes ago. Grumbling, I pulled the sheets around myself and shouted back. "Okay, but it had better be worth waking me up!"

The door creaked open. A scaled snout poked through, shortly followed by the rest of the kobold. "Oh, it totally be worth it," Deekin reassured me. He closed the door behind him. He had his pack slung over his shoulder and a calculating gleam in his liquid black eyes. "So. I gots a question for you, Boss."

"Which is?"

The kobold grinned. "You wanna be rich?"

"Gods, no, not again."

Deekin nodded patiently. "O-kay. You wanna have more money than no money, at least?"

"Maybe. Why?"

The kobold's grin widened until his face was practically all teeth. "'Cause Deekin just finished doing all the addings and subtri…suttra…minus-ings, and if he be right, all we gots to do is find a merchant who'll give us an okay price for some of this stuff and then we be rollings in the dough."

I wavered. It would be nice to have a _little_ money. Not enough to cause trouble, but enough to buy myself some decent supplies. "All right," I conceded. "Give me time to take a bath and get dressed."

Deekin bobbed his head. "You might wanna do something about your hair, too, Boss," he suggested. He turned around, his spindly hand already on the doorknob. "You kinda be reminding Deekin of Heurodis, and it kinda be freaking him out."

What a lovely little tidbit of criticism to wake up to. "Fine. I'll go sit in the bathtub and slit my wrists, won't I?"

Deekin rolled his eyes. "Gawd, don't be so _dramatic_ , Boss." Then he slipped out of the door before I could answer.

On the one hand, it was nice to see that the little guy had become so self-sufficient. On the other hand, he was starting to sound a little too much like me, and it was making me want to stuff his tail in his mouth.

I felt slightly more human after a boiling hot soak and a little sorely-needed personal time in the tub. I hoped any drow who were spying on my quarters enjoyed the show, or what they could see of it through their peepholes, but even if they didn't, that was just too bad, because under the circumstances I needed all the stress relief I could get.

Still, stress relief or no stress relief, a black malaise still gnawed at me, apparently unrelievable by any means I had available. Strange, half-remembered dream images lingered in my head, like fog.

Deekin was waiting for me in the hallway. His eyes brightened when he saw me. "Ready to go, Boss?" He was practically bouncing on his toes.

The urge to make the kobold eat his own tail faded at the sight of his beaming little face. "Yeah." I reached down to take his hand. The black malaise receded, a little. "Let's go, little buddy."

Outside, a small contingent of golems was marching back and forth across the temple square under the watchful eyes of Imloth, who was lounging on the temple stairs with what looked for all the world like a cigarette in hand. Nathyrra's slim, leather-clad shape was walking among the golems, talking and gesturing animatedly.

Further on, there were tall, shining figures patrolling the city walls, and more wandering the streets. Winged red shapes circled over the city. It seemed like Valen hadn't just found places for the golems – he'd put them on guard duty. _Figures_. A grudging smile rose up through the gloom that covered me, pushing the malaise back a little further. _If he could surround the Seer with a wall of metal men, he would._

I made my way down to Imloth and plopped down next to him. He nodded at me and blew a stream of smoke from his nostrils, his pale eyes narrowing with some kind of private amusement. " _Vendui_ , priestess." He indicated the golems with a flick of his cigarette. "I hear that we have you to thank for our new allies."

 _Holy shit._ I actually recognized that word from Nathyrra's lessons. _Vendui_ meant 'hello'. " _Vendui_ , Imloth," I said, waving Deekin ahead. The kobold made a face and dashed off to pester Nathyrra and the golems. "Yeah," I went on. "I decided to give the locals a challenge – bring them somebody who couldn't be poisoned or backstabbed." Imloth chuckled. The smell of smoke made me twitch with an urge I hadn't felt in a while. I gestured at his smoke. "You mind if I…"

Without comment, the drow passed me his rollup. I took a drag and watched smoke curl away from me on my long exhale. The soothing buzz of nicotine went through me, taking a little more of the edge off of my mood. It wasn't quite a cigarette – it was spicier, sweeter, muskier – but it was close enough. "Thanks," I said with a relieved sigh, and passed the rollup back.

Imloth took the cigarette without looking. His eyes were on Nathyrra. "Is it not beautiful?" he murmured.

I followed his stare. Nathyrra was, for some reason, measuring one of the golems with a piece of string. What _was_ the woman doing? Had she decided to add tailoring to her insanely long list of accomplishments? "What's beautiful?" I asked absently.

An odd, sad smile crooked up one corner of Imloth's mouth. "Her innocence," he said. He took a deep lungful of smoke and exhaled it slowly, watching Nathyrra pepper the golem with questions. "Lolth kills innocence. Yet after all Nathyrra has seen and all she has done, there is still an innocence to her that Lolth has never been able to take. And that is beautiful."

It was hard to think of an ex-assassin as innocent, but he did have a point. Nathyrra knew a lot more than me about complicated stuff, like magic or languages, but not as much as I would have expected about the simple stuff, like how to make small talk or stop viewing everything as a competition. Thoughtfully, I accepted the cigarette again. Inhaled. Exhaled. Passed it back. "The Seer called Lolth a disease," I remarked.

Imloth nodded. "Yes. Lolth is sick, and makes us sick, like her." He looked away and took a long, contemplative drag on his cigarette. "We are not an evil people, priestess. No more than yours."

I studied the drow's face. His playful air was gone, and it had taken his smile with it. "So what are you?" I asked quietly.

Imloth sighed. "Afraid."

I looked out over the city, and all of its graceful spires and twilight colors and velvet shadows. "What happens if Lolth never comes back?"

Imloth looked out over the city, too, his eyes distant. "Eilistraee willing, my people will wake from their nightmare."

My gaze shifted to my fingers. They flexed. For a moment, in the place of my fingers I almost saw long, hooked black claws, like knives. I shuddered and looked up. "I hope so. God knows I've had enough of nightmares."

The drow's smile flickered back to life, faintly. "As have I, priestess. As have I."

Imloth and I sat and smoked for a while in companionable silence. "So," I said, a couple of cigarettes later. "I wanted to ask you…"

Imloth perked up. "Yes?"

"Deekin has some things to sell, and we were looking for a merchant who won't try to cheat us too badly."

Imloth's eyes brightened. "Ah," he said laughingly. "A challenge!" He stood, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out with the toe of his boot. "Come, then. I can spare a little more time from my duties. I will take you to someone I-" He paused. "I almost said 'trust', but this is not the right word," he corrected himself, in his lilting and slightly halting way. "Shall we say, someone that I mistrust not so much?"

I grinned. "Fair enough," I said, and followed him down the stairs.

As we crossed the temple square, Deekin and Nathyrra drifted over to meet us halfway. They were both writing things down, Deekin in his messy journal and Nathyrra in a small leather-bound book no larger than her hand. When our paths crossed, Nathyrra fell into pace without looking up from her notes. "I cannot even begin to understand the layers of enchantment here," she began without so much as a 'hello', as if resuming a recently interrupted conversation. "The duergar are known for their magical craftsmanship, but this is exceptional, even for a duergar." She closed her book with a snap and looked up, her dark eyes shining. "And the _minds_ of these golems! They are fully self-aware and highly intelligent, although in some ways it seems that they still think like constructs. I have never seen their like."

I look at her askance. "You seem pretty fond of them."

The drow woman hesitated. "I suppose that I am," she admitted at last. "They are…very pure, in a way." Her voice softened. "It gives me hope. If the natural inclination of all thinking beings is towards goodness, and evil a corruption of that natural state, then perhaps my people are not beyond saving." Abruptly, she looked around, as if she'd just realized that we were walking somewhere. "Oh. Where are we going?"

I wasn't sure how a former assassin could be this oblivious. I was starting to suspect that it was because while she'd been trained as an assassin, what Nathyrra truly was, at heart, was a raging nerd. "We're going to the market," I explained. "Deekin and I have a few things to sell."

Nathyrra nodded and slipped her book into a belt pocket. "Good. I shall accompany you. I need to buy a few things, myself."

This was turning out to be an all-hands-on-deck shopping expedition. "Maybe we should ask one of the golems along to carry our bags," I mused.

Nathyrra looked at me sharply. Then she smiled. "I will be right back," she said, and trotted back to the golems. "Cupron!" she called. "I would speak with you a moment."

* * *

It was a strange group that wound its way through the streets of Lith My'athar.

 _So,_ I mused. _A kobold bard, an ex-killer-for-hire, a drow playboy, a whatever-I-am of Shaundakul, and a giant metal bellhop walk into a bar…_

I wasn't sure what the punchline to that joke would be, but I had a sneaking suspicion that _we_ were the punchline.

I felt a little guilty about the fact that we'd pressed one of the golems' leaders into service as a glorified pack mule, but Cupron didn't seem to mind, so I figured I shouldn't, either. As we walked, Cupron looked around him with an air of earnest fascination, his head swiveling as he seemed to absorb every sight and sound and tidbit of new information like a really big, shiny sponge.

The Lith My'athar market was a bizarre echo of a surface open-air market. Merchants' stalls with their colorful awnings stood in rows that filled the market square, exactly like any other market I'd ever seen, in this world or my old one. The stalls weren't wooden, as they would have been topside, but were anything from stone to mushroom fiber to metal, and all were lantern-lit. Faint tracers of smoke rose from the lanterns, and a slight, funky smell hovered over the market. It reminded me of the Bedine, and the dried camel dung they used for their fires.

Nathyrra gave me a little lecture on drow culture as we walked. "Most of the noble Houses have their own artisans – smiths, alchemists, enchanters, and so forth - which see to many of their needs," she said. "Thus, you will not often see nobles shopping in a place such as this, unless they are young and…adventuring."

"Slumming it, you mean," I supplied.

"I am sorry," Nathyrra said politely. "I do not understand. What is slumming it?"

Trying to find ways to explain slang to Nathyrra was, if nothing else, giving my brain a workout. "Um. Okay. A slum is….the poor part of the city. When people from the rich part of the city go to the poor part for fun, you call that 'slumming it'."

Nathyrra nodded crisply. "I see! Thank you. And yes, it is just as you say. Sometimes, noble young will go to places they should not, because they should not."

"Some things must be universal." Drow or human, Earth or Toril, there seemed to be some constants everywhere I went. People doing stupid shit when they were young was obviously one of those constants.

Nathyrra smiled. "I must admit, I did much the same when I was younger." She shrugged. "Though I soon grew out of such folly. I was young, untrained, and a ripe target. It is a wonder I was not assassinated just to teach my mother a lesson about letting me act so imprudently." Her voice turned dry and a little bitter. "But then, I was the youngest of four daughters, and my mother seldom noticed what I did unless it inconvenienced her."

The question was already surfacing from my throat before I could think better of it. "How old are you?"

Nathyrra thought for a moment. "I have lived for ninety-two years, as you surfacers reckon time."

She was old enough to be my grandma, only the last time I'd seen my grandma she'd been doddering, white-haired, and so far into don't-give-a-shit senility that she routinely tried to talk her nurses into threesomes, whereas Nathyrra was so sharp she could cut people, and probably had. "Right," I said weakly. _Note to self: never ask an elf's age again. Ever._

Nathyrra went on, apparently not noticing my discomfort. "Regardless, it is more likely that you will see commoners here, or the servants of noble Houses, or even the House artisans themselves, buying food and supplies and other small necessities."

We passed a stall which looked for all the world like a produce merchant, with crates full of strange tubers and of mushrooms that ran the gamut from innocuous, like the plain little white caps, to bizarre, like the little red puffballs with long, spidery white whiskers. I also, to my shock, saw something that looked much more familiar. "Holy crap! Are those fenberries?" I needed to make potions, too. As soon as Deekin had money, those berries were _mine_. "And…do I see apples? And garlic?"

Nathyrra glanced at the stall. "I do not know what these – apples, you said? – are, but yes, not all that you see here comes from the Underdark. Lith My'athar is a wealthy city, and thanks to House Vharzyym, with its druidic talents and its ties to the surface, it has better access to surface markets than most – though I warn you, such goods are likely to be quite costly." She coughed. "Also, I would not recommend staring at the merchandise. It is considered gauche."

I was staring, but not at the produce. There was a human woman shopping at the stall. She was pale, blonde, young, and had a metal collar around her neck. She hadn't looked up from her task. I didn't think she'd seen me, but I'd sure as hell seen her.

Nathyrra's head turned, following my stare. She winced visibly. "Oh. Ah. Yes," she said, her voice going a little stilted. "Noble Houses often keep human slaves. They are quick learners, intelligent, and useful for…" The drow woman got a good look at my face, and the rest of her words came out on a rush. 'Formanyformsoflabor."

Several of the drow in the square were looking at me. In light of that slave, I thought I could be forgiven for seeing collars and chains in their glances. "How do humans end up down here?" I asked.

Nathyrra cleared her throat. "From raids on the surface or the slave trade through Skullport." She gave me one of her cautious sideways glances. Her dark face was still hard for me to read, but the slight forward hunch of her shoulders suggested discomfort. "I…am sorry. I thought you knew. Perhaps I should have warned you."

I looked away from the slave, drew in a deep breath, and blew it out slowly through my nose. "Right," I said tightly. "Fine. Now I know. Fine."

The weight of an arm settled on my shoulder, and a slender, black-skinned hand appeared in front of my face, a lit cigarette held loosely between two of its fingers. "Perhaps, one day, our people will see that it is better to make friends than enemies and slaves," Imloth said. He looked around sadly. "Alas, I think that day is very far away."

I took the offered rollup with relief and sucked on it until the filter glowed cherry-red and the urge to rip that collar off the woman's neck and beat her so-called owner to death with it had faded. Slightly. _Thank Shaundakul for nicotine, that's all I can say._ The human slave had moved on to another stall. She kept her head down, I noticed, and didn't speak, only communicating through gestures. I hoped she didn't look up. I didn't want her to look up and see me, walking free while she wore that collar.

My eyes stung. "Do they ever get away?" I asked. Nathyrra shook her head mutely. I took several frantic puffs on Imloth's cancer stick. Smoke rose in front of me like I was a signal fire. "Yeah. Guess they wouldn't." Slaves were valuable, and a human, alone, was a goner in a place like this. At least I had allies who were well-armed and knowledgeable and could see in the dark, and the fact was, if not for them, I'd probably be just as screwed as that woman over there.

Our golem companion was looking from Nathyrra to the slave. "Query. This woman of whom you speak is not free?" it asked.

Nathyrra turned to the golem. "No, Cupron," she said, her voice taking on a strangely patient note. "She is not."

Cupron seemed to process this. "This is wrong," he said slowly. "She is a sentient being with free will, as are we. She should be free, as are we." He thought a little more. "Query. Is it possible to free her, as we were freed?"

Nathyrra winced a little. "Not at present. I am sorry, Cupron."

The golem turned a puzzled, emerald-eyed gaze on the drow. "Query. Why is freeing the human slave not possible at present?"

The drow woman sighed. "Because she is enslaved by our allies, and if we free her, we will anger them, and then they will not help us defeat the Valsharess, and then we will all be enslaved. Or killed."

Cupron's eye-lights dimmed for a few seconds, as if he was thinking so hard he'd temporarily gone into standby. Then they came back on, brighter than before. "Ah. I see. You state that to correct the greater evil, it is necessary to accept the lesser evil."

"That is correct."

The golem's coppery face almost seemed to go molten as it morphed into a frown. "How many sentient beings do our allies keep as slaves?"

"Many, I am afraid," Nathyrra answered.

"Query. How many is many?"

"I do not know, Cupron. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands."

The golem spoke slowly, as if struggling his way through a new idea. "Query. The decision to permit an evil to continue is determined by the ratio of one form of evil to another form of evil?"

Nathyrra blinked. "I…suppose you might put it that way, yes."

Cupron's frown deepened. "To determine a ratio, a measurement must be obtained. Query. What is the correct unit of measurement for evil?"

Nathyrra's patient tone hadn't budged. "There is none, Cupron. It is…a subjective judgement."

"I see," Cupron said. Abruptly, he sat down in the middle of the street. "This is difficult for me to comprehend. I must think," he announced. The lights in his eyes went out, and he went still.

Imloth started laughing.

I nudged the golem with my foot. He didn't react. "Uh, Nathyrra? I think you broke him."

The drow woman stared at the golem. Her voice rose into a very un-Nathyrra-like squeak. "I did not mean to!"

Imloth laughed harder.

The golem didn't budge even when I gave him a good shove. "My question is, if something's wrong with him, do we take him to a healer, or a blacksmith?" I wondered.

The kobold poked at the golem with one clawed finger. "Dunno, but Deekin gonna go out on a limb and say it gonna be pretty hard to take him anywhere. He be awfully heavy."

Nathyrra sighed. "We will have to leave him here, for now. I doubt anyone will be able to steal him, and perhaps he will have finished thinking by the time we are done." She gestured. "Come. We should not tarry too long. People are beginning to stare."

I looked around. She was right. I hit Imloth's shoulder lightly with the back of my hand. "Chill, _abbil_ ," I said. "We're making a scene."

Imloth finally got a hold of himself. "Yes. You are right." He lips twitched. "I beg your pardon." He straightened his leathers, then led us to a stall with a red awning. There was a drow man lounging behind it, who stood up and called out a greeting when Imloth approached. Imloth replied with a liquid string of syllables, laughing, before turning back to us. "This is Jevan, who is dishonest but honestly so, and is willing to do business even with rebels and humans if we have anything of interest to offer," he said, by way of introduction. "Now, what were you selling?"

Deekin tugged imperiously on my pants leg. "Lemme up, Boss, I gots to see."

I picked him up so he was level with Jevan, reflecting as I did so that it _really_ took a lot of patience to be friends with my friends.

Then Deekin upended his bag on Jevan's counter, and I stopped reflecting, although a whole lot of other things did – reflect, that is.

Jevan looked down. His black fingers closed on an eyeball-sized sapphire, and he lifted it up to the light, clearly admiring its sparkle. Then he looked at Deekin and smiled. "Welcome to my humble shop, honored customer. How may I assist you today?"

* * *

I tugged on the square of red silk knotted around Enserric's crosspiece. "I like it," I said. "Red's definitely your color."

Enserric's voice was sullen. "You are lucky I am no longer alive. Were I alive, I think I would presently be asking someone to kill me."

I craned my head around to eye the sword where it rode in a scabbard slung across my back. The scabbard was black leather, tooled, and had cost a pretty penny. Just as Magda always said, it made the sword a bitch to draw, but now at least I could have both hands free when I wasn't fighting – and I wouldn't have to worry so much about dropping the damn thing. And if someone got the jump on me, well, I had plenty of other ways to hurt people, if I had to. "Don't be so grumpy, Enserric," I groused.

"Very well. Perhaps I should ask someone to kill you, instead? I think that might improve my mood."

"Or so violent."

"Excuse me? I am a _sword_ , not a fluffy blanket. My sole reason to exist is to do violence."

Imloth looked at my sword, then looked at me. "Does this happen often?" he asked. "That you and your weapon argue, I mean to say."

I sighed. "All the time."

Cupron's arms were overflowing with bags. "Query. How does this serve the greater good?" he asked Nathyrra.

The drow woman pursed her lips. "It equips us to fight the Valsharess more effectively."

"I see." Cupron looked down at the bags. "No, I do not see," he amended. "How does this 'food' equip us to fight, please?"

Nathyrra plucked a small meat pie from a mushroom-paper sack the golem had tucked into the crook of his elbow. "Living beings require energy," she said, holding up the pie. "Food is our power source." Then she took a big bite.

The golem's face cleared. "Ah, now I understand." He stood up a little straighter, radiating benign contentment. "I am glad that I chose to accompany you. I am learning many interesting things about other sentient beings."

Nathyrra smiled and touched his arm with a strange fondness. "Learning is always a worthy pursuit," she assured him. She turned to me. "I must return to my duties," she said abruptly, which would have come off as more professional if she weren't gesturing with a meat pie. "Have you considered your next steps against the Valsharess?"

Maybe there _was_ a reason why nobody liked Nathyrra. The woman was as tactless as I was, but a lot chillier and not nearly as friendly about it – as if I really needed to be reminded of the Valsharess's existence right now. "Not yet."

She nodded. "Please keep me informed. In the meantime, I will continue to study that map you received. I believe that it may yield more information about this putative alliance between Vharzyym and Ischarri."

Imloth arched an eyebrow. "More work? _I_ believe we should celebrate our new allies. A little drink and a revel at the city tavern seem called for, no?"

Deekin looked back and forth between us. "Er," he said. "Does this mean we be going where drow be eating?"

The look of apprehension on the bard's face spoke volumes. "You don't have to go, Deeks."

Deekin's voice said he was thinking of his art, but his face said he was picturing kobolds on skewers. "But…"

"I'll tell you all about it afterwards," I reassured him. "Then you can fill in the blanks by making shit up, like you usually do."

Deekin thought about that for about two seconds. Then he grinned. "Deal."

Nathyrra was frowning. "Do we have time for such frivolous pursuits?"

Imloth smiled almost sunnily in the face of her frown. "We will make time. Come. Are you drow, or a duergar, to be so dour?"

The drow woman's frown deepened. She tossed her hair. "I am no such thing, and you, male, are presumptuous."

Imloth's smile went crooked. "Yes, I am. But I am not stupid, and I think it would be good if the city sees the priestess. They talk about her now. If they do not see her, they will say she is afraid to show her face."

Nathyrra's frown was slowly losing its disapproving edge and turning pensive. "You are suggesting a show of confidence."

The other drow half-shrugged, half-nodded. "Yes. What you said. So, we shall go to the tavern and let it be seen that she is our ally and she does not hide." He stubbed out another cigarette with the toe of his boot. He sighed. " _After_ I have taught some of our forces that the proper use of an arrow is not the pinning of your own ear to your own head."

I looked at him curiously. "I thought elves were good at archery."

Imloth grimaced. "If so, no one has told these elves about this."

Nathyrra was tapping her finger against her lips, thoughtful. "A show of confidence," she mused. "Yes. That is prudent. Now that Rebecca has caught the city's attention, I think it would be wise to try to shape their opinion of her to our advantage."

That killed what was left of my good mood. The idea of going out for a celebratory drink was great. The idea of doing it while surrounded by drow who might want to kill me was not so great. "You think the Houses have noticed me?"

Nathyrra looked at the Maker's golems, standing diligently to attention all around the temple and patrolling the streets and walls of Lith My'athar. "I think it is probable," she said clinically. "And I suspect that they will soon begin testing you in earnest." She bowed briefly. "Until later."

Imloth watched her go, his face unreadable. When she was out of sight, he turned to me. "Priestess," he said, and flashed me his devastating smile. "I will come help you adorn yourself, later. If you will go among the drow, you must look your best. Drow disdain other races, but prize beauty and power above all. When we show you to them, we cannot show a human – we must show a goddess." He looked me up and down and punctured my ego a little by adding, "Leave ample time. This will not be easy."

I restrained a wince. "What about armor?" I touched Enserric. "And weapons?"

The drow shook his head. "In Lith My'athar, as in many other cities of the drow, peace is enforced in the places of revelry, weapons are forbidden, and bloodshed is punished severely."

I started to relax a little. "You mean there's no killing allowed?"

Imloth looked vaguely surprised. "Oh, no, no, there _is_ killing." He smiled, as if trying to be reassuring, only it was going to take a whole lot more than a smile to make up for _that_ statement, especially when he added, "But if it is done, it must be done without a weapon, and must not be discovered. So it is very difficult and only the truly cunning or desperate attempt it."

These people were insane. "You're telling me anything goes as long as you're smart enough to figure out how to get away with it?"

Imloth chuckled, and for once, there was no mirth in it. "Yes. Such is the way of the Lolth-ridden." Then he sighed. "This is the game, priestess," he told me. "I do not like this game any more than you, but while we are in the Underdark, we must play." He bowed. " _Aluvé._ "

I wasn't sure what he'd just said, but I nodded anyway. I watched the two drow go, each to their separate duties. Then I heaved a sigh of my own, retrieved my bags from Cupron, thanked the golem for his help, and trudged back into the temple.

Deekin trotted after me, clutching his pack with its thoroughly deceptive little bag of holding. "Whatcha doing now, Boss?"

I touched the silk scarf that was knotted around Enserric's hilt. "Something crazy. Wanna help?"

The kobold grinned from ear to ear, or at least ear-hole to ear-hole. "You even gotta ask?"

Deeks and I dropped off our shopping bags and found an empty practice room, one with a row of practice dummies at one end. _Perfect._ I unslung Enserric's scabbard from my back and drew the sword out. Just a few dim red sparkles showed in the glossy black blade, which seemed to be a sign that Enserric was either taking his version of a nap or sulking. I started to flick the blade with a fingernail, then I remembered the black-haired ghost I'd seen in Lomylithrar's cage, and I tapped the sword gently, instead. "Enserric. I need you."

The sword flashed red. "What?" the dead mage's voice echoed out of the blade. "What's happened? Did somebody die? Does somebody need to? What?"

I sighed. I missed Silent Partner – especially the 'silent' part. "No, nothing like that. I just wanted to try something." I set Enserric down against the wall and untied the red silk scarf. "You said the sword you're in is made of…blood glass, wasn't it? Is that really a kind of glass?"

Enserric flickered. "Technically, yes. It is a naturally occurring byproduct of volcanic activity, so the composition is not quite the same as man-made glass, but it is similar. Why?" That funny rolodex flipping sensation happened in my head. The sword's voice changed, taking on a note of sudden intrigue. "Oh! I see that the money spent on your education was not _entirely_ wasted." The flickers increased, almost as if in eagerness. "Pray, proceed."

I snorted. "I only slept through most of school, not all of it." I held the sword up and began rubbing the silk scarf against the blade, like I was polishing it. "Anything happening?"

Red rippled through the black blade. "It…tingles. Rather unpleasantly, I might add."

"Good."

"Good?"

"Yeah. Means it's working. Maybe." I polished a little more vigorously. The silk started to cling to my fingers. Then it started to crackle.

Then, faintly, a tiny blue-white pinpoint flashed on Enserric's obsidian blade.

As soon as I saw the spark, I dropped the silk scarf and ran my palm along the flat of the sword, feeling a tingle gather in my hand. _Here goes,_ I thought, and drew up my power, calling to that little built-up cluster of static charge.

A tiny lightning bolt jumped from my hand and fizzled out halfway to the floor.

Enserric harrumphed. "I think your technique needs considerable refinement."

I ignored that little remark and retrieved the scarf. "Let's try this again."

My next lightning bolt was a stunted little thing, although it still managed to hit a weapons rack and knock a couple of daggers to the floor.

The next bolt was still stunted, but it grazed a dummy on its way to the wall, which I supposed was progress, since I'd been aiming for the dummy all along.

I rubbed, gathered, called, aimed. My aim got better, grazing the dummies more often than anything else, but the size of my lightning bolts didn't improve much.

Deekin watched owlishly. "What're you trying to do, Boss?"

Blowing out a frustrated breath, I lowered Enserric. "I need lightning, Deeks."

"Can't you just call it?"

"Not without a storm, I can't. There are none down here, and I can't make lightning out of thin air. The Maker's lab had plenty, and the Power Source had more, but I can't use that without lobotomizing a whole bunch of golems, so…" I did my little experiment again. This time, the lightning bolt jumped towards the ceiling and knocked a tiny chip out of the marble. I sighed. "I was kinda hoping I could make some this way, but it isn't working so hot."

Deekin clicked his talons together, frowning in thought. "So you can't call lightning unless you gots lightning already there to call, is that it?"

"In a nutshell."

The kobold stared at me. "Bo-oss!" he wailed. He stamped his foot. "Why don't you _tell_ Deekin these things?"

I blinked at him. What was he yelling at me for? "Er. Sorry?"

Deekin's spindly hands clutched his head. "Don't be sorry, just stop keeping secrets!" he yelled. He jumped up. "Wait. Wait. Hold on. Deekin gots an idea." He scampered for the door. Then he bounced off a pair of mithril-encased shins and looked up. "Oh. Hi, goat-man. You looms awfully suddenly sometimes, you know that?"

Valen frowned down at the kobold, his hands on his hips. With his height and his broad-shouldered, athletic frame, the way he filled the doorway _was_ , in all fairness, kind of loom-y. "Are you ever going to stop calling me that?"

Deekin grinned cheekily. "Who knows? Deekin thinking maybe he should cultivate air of mysteriosity. Keep people guessing. All the best bards do it." He looked back at me and waved. "Deekin be back soon, Boss. Gotta check his notes." He dodged around Valen's legs and scampered off, muttering. "Hmm. Maybe…no, that not work, but…ooh! Yeah, maybe that…"

Valen watched the kobold go. "Is 'mysteriosity' even a word?" he asked huffily. "I do not think that is a word."

I shrugged, not really trusting myself to answer. I hadn't been expecting him to loom so suddenly, as Deekin put it, and those remarks about my so-called 'recklessness' still rankled, and I wasn't sure if he was still upset with me or not, and for once in my life, I couldn't really think of anything to say.

Silence fell, wherein Valen and I looked at the wall, the floor, the weapons racks, and then, when we'd exhausted all other options, each other.

After a few moments, Valen cleared his throat. "I was just looking for you."

I met his blue eyes. "Oh. Uh. Well. Here I am." I cleared my own throat. "So," I said then.

Valen stared at me. "So."

More silence. "You wanted to see me?" I ventured, a little desperate.

He jumped a little. "Ah…yes." He looked at me sideways, started to speak, stopped, and started again. "How are you? The Seer said you seemed…weary."

'Weary' was obviously a very Seer way of saying 'depressed'. Also, I got the impression that whatever Valen had originally meant to say, it hadn't been what had actually come out of his mouth. He'd fumbled a little too much over his words, and anyway I didn't think he'd tracked me down here just to ask how I was. "I'm fine," I said. "I mean, as fine as can be expected. Considering." Hell, the fact that I wasn't curled into a fetal position and sobbing on the floor already struck me as a big accomplishment. _Considering._

Valen nodded and wandered across the room as if searching for something. He reached the scorched practice dummy and poked it. His fingertips came away black with ash. Absently, he rubbed them together, brushing the ash off. "What were you doing? Practicing spells?"

I flushed. "Uh. Sort of." I looked down and scuffed my toe on the mat. Deekin's admonishment about keeping secrets replayed itself in my head. "On that note, I, uh, should probably tell you something."

The red-haired warrior turned to look at me. His eyes roamed over my face. "Very well. What is it?"

Was my face red? It felt red. "I ran into a little problem when I came to the Underdark." I realized that I was fiddling with my hair and lowered my hand. "Okay, so I lied. It's actually a big problem." Then, my words coming out in a nervous jumble, I explained about the whole no-lightning-underground thing.

Valen stared at me. Then he smacked his forehead and palmed his face in the universal pantomime of dismayed exasperation. "Why did you not mention this earlier?"

"Deekin asked the same question." I winced and rubbed the back of my neck, averting my eyes from his. "Honestly, I think I'm just too used to working alone. Didn't really occur to me to say anything, and if it did, it never seemed to be the right time." Drogan had taught me to be self-sufficient, and the past few years on the road had only cemented his lessons. Life on the road was unpredictable. Shit happened. Friends and travel companions came and went. The only constant was myself. Also, if I wanted to be even more honest, I didn't like having to admit to weakness in front of Mister 'I Survived the Abyss'. Deekin was right, though. Keeping secrets like this was pretty dumb, even for me. Besides – Valen wouldn't hurt me. He might scold me, but if he hadn't hurt me after all the provocations and opportunities I'd given him, he wouldn't hurt me now. "I'm sorry," I added, contrite. "I've been told that keeping secrets is a bad habit of mine."

Valen stared at me. Then he sighed and he looked down, running a hand through his hair. "Well, better late than never," he muttered. "And I suppose I cannot blame you for being reluctant to speak up, considering..." He trailed off, frowning and flushing and avoiding my eyes, the very picture of guilt.

I wasn't sure how we'd gotten from me making a confession to Valen looking guilty, but it made me want to reassure him, all of a sudden. "Deekin said he had some ideas," I supplied, and grinned crookedly, as if my smile could drag one out of him. "I've got faith in him. If the world famous kobold bard can't figure something out, no one can."

Valen nodded. My attempt to get him to smile failed, but his expression did ease. "He _is_ amazingly resourceful," he admitted. Tilting his head a little, he studied me. A lock of blood-colored hair fell across his eyes, a problem he solved with an absent-minded toss of his head. "What can I do to help?"

Suddenly, Enserric was about the only thing holding me up. "What can you-" I repeated in a shocked wheeze. "You're serious? You actually want to help?"

Valen's forehead furrowed, as if he couldn't quite make sense of what I was saying. "Yes, of course. We are in this together, after all." He looked at me a little more closely. His eyes widened just a touch. "You are not used to asking for help, are you?"

I shrugged and looked down at my feet. "Not really, no." My job was to help people, not ask for help, and I'd be damned if I failed to do my job. Again. "I don't know how you could help, though," I added. "I mean, thanks, but unless you have a way to make lightning…"

Valen frowned. "Alas, I do not." He drummed his fingers on his flail. "Pity we cannot ask the golems to give up their Power Source."

I sighed in agreement. "Yeah. I had the same thought. Shame the Maker didn't make two." My tone was wistful. "If I had one of those, now…"

Valen gave me one of those odd looks. "Would that you did."

"Why do you say that?"

His voice was wry, but not only. If I'd taken a lot of drugs and then fallen and cracked my head on something really hard, I would have called it admiring. "I saw the storm you called in the Maker's sanctum, with the aid of the Power Source. If you had such a device permanently at your disposal, very little would be able to stand in your way."

I remembered Aghaaz. "Golems would."

"Yes, and rocs, and blue dragons, and Powers forbid we run into an air elemental – we are underground, after all, so one should be along any moment now," Valen retorted, his voice so tart it could have curdled milk. "Windwalker, why is it that every time I try to give you a compliment, you turn it into a complaint?"

He really was a _snarky_ son of a bitch. I shrugged and smiled disarmingly, trying to deflect his snark with the patented Blumenthal charm. "What can I say? It's a gift."

Valen gave me a long, level look. "I can think of many words for it, but 'gift' is not one of them."

My patented Blumenthal charm obviously worked as well on him as a thin stream of piss worked to put out a grease fire. "Okay, fine. So I don't ask for help and don't take compliments." I put my hand on my hip, affecting an indignant pose. "Was there anything else you'd like to critique today?"

Valen's comeback was swift. "As a matter of fact, yes. Your swordmanship still needs work. You do not even seem to be aware that you have a left flank, much less how to protect it."

If I ever started to feel good about my combat skills, I knew who to turn to in order to be cut down to size. Thing was, he was right. "That's only natural," I conceded. "I'm right-handed."

Valen shook his head. "And that is the first thing you must unlearn. You always lead with your right side. It makes you predictable, and predictable will get you killed." He stabbed a finger at me. "You cannot afford to think of yourself as right-handed or left-handed when wielding a two-handed weapon. You must learn to think and to move with both sides of your body, and to favor neither. Why your teacher did not teach you this in the first place-"

"Teachers. Plural. But I think they had their work cut out for them." I'd never held a weapon before Harry had put a quarterstaff in my hands, and while he'd done what he could in the time he had, I'd still come to Drogan knowing less about combat than his other students. Hell, I'd known less about _everything_ , compared to his other students. They'd grown up in this world. I hadn't. "Besides, one of my teachers was basically a mute, and the other was a wizard."

"A mute and a wizard taught you how to fight?" One red-gold eyebrow arched. "That explains a great deal."

I bristled. "Hey, those are my mentors you're talking about there, pal. They were good people. Show some respect."

Valen looked at me for a moment. Then he inclined his head, a faint blush high on his cheekbones. "You are right. I…allowed my temper to get the better of my tongue. I beg your pardon."

My hackles settled. "It's all right," I relented. "You've got a point. A wizard was never going to be the best weapons trainer in the world." I looked at him sharply, realizing that I'd never really seen him favor one hand over the other. "What are you, anyway? Right-handed or left-handed?"

Valen looked down at his own hands. Then he held out his left hand, wiggled his fingers a little, and looked at me.

I blinked. "You're a leftie?" Abruptly, I laughed. He'd better not tell the folks back home – it might confirm a few superstitions that didn't need confirmation. "I'd never have guessed."

Valen smiled thinly at me. "Precisely." He surveyed the weapons racks. Then, all at once, he strode over to one and selected a wooden practice sword – with his right hand, I noticed. Then he turned back to me, twirling the sword to settle his grip. "Let me show you."

I looked at him warily and shifted my grip on Enserric. "Shouldn't we blunt my sword?" I asked. I summoned some bravado from somewhere. "You don't normally fight with a sword. I'd hate to hurt you."

The tiefling's body didn't swagger, but his voice did. "Little chance of that," he said, and without warning, his sword lashed out.

The blow connected with the tendon on the back of my right forearm, sending a shuddering pain running up and down my arm and forcing my hand to open. Enserric clattered to the ground. I bit back the cry of pain, but not the curse. "Fucking showoff," I ground out, cradling my arm.

Valen huffed an all-too-brief laugh at me. "Pick it up," he said, pointing his chin at my fallen greatsword. He circled me, his narrow-eyed smirk something close to cocky. "And pay more attention next time."

I retrieved Enserric, and for my troubles, I got a stinging thwack on the left hip. I yelped and went to bat it away, but I was too slow – the son of a bitch was already backing away, resettling the sword in his hand. "That wasn't fair!"

Valen's face was unsympathetic. "Life is not fair," he told me. "In a true fight, your opponent will not stand and wait while you retrieve your weapon. I am already going easy on you – I will not teach you bad habits on top of that." He gestured with his weapon. "Now, raise your guard."

I gritted my teeth and did as he said, holding Enserric point-up and slanted across my body, close-in, one hand above the crosspiece and one below. "Fine. And now?"

Then, the weapon master came after me.

His first hit batted my sword sideways and whipped back around in a blur to add to the bruising on my hip.

 _Damn it._ I gritted my teeth, and we squared off again.

Next time, I shifted my guard to the left but the fucking ginger seemed to predict I'd do just that and his sword was already snaking through the fence of my greatsword to give me a nice firm poke in the ribs. I swatted his blade away, too little too late, even as he withdrew it, so that I didn't so much deflect as give him a retaliatory swipe.

Obsidian rang against steel-cored wood, again and again, and gradually I saw what he was talking about – I held Enserric to my right side more than any other, protected my right side more than any other. I didn't know why, but instinct spun me that way, and I followed instinct, but it kept hitting me in the ass – literally, in this case, as Valen's practice sword left me limping.

Irritation rose, and with it, a whisper of power, murmuring in my blood and breath and humming in my hand where I held Enserric. My skin pebbled and my spine tingled and my senses seemed to sharpen like I'd just gotten a rush of adrenaline, only instead of heat I felt my senses go sharp and cold, like icicles.

The power ran through me, and suddenly, Enserric and I were in sync again, just like we'd been in that cage, and the sword in my hands didn't feel so alien anymore.

Obsidian rang against steel-filled wood, and I swatted the tiefling's next strike down and away – barely away, but away.

Valen stepped back, lowering his sword. "Good." He didn't have to sound so surprised. "You learn quickly."

Enserric drooped in my hands, and just like that, the crystal clarity drained away, like water through my fingers. Dismay ran through me in the place of…whatever that had been. I wasn't sure what was worse – the fact that I'd known what to do, or that the crystal clarity that had fallen over me had felt so cold and so dark, like black glass. "I've got a lot of incentive," I muttered. Abruptly, I sat on the bench, my knees gone wobbly. "What with the queen of the drow trying to kill me and all."

Valen looked at me, his sword still held low. Some strange inner struggle passed over his face, and with a huff of breath, he gestured at the bench. "Sit. Rest." He leaned against the walls, his eyes still on me. "Speaking of the Valsharess, have you decided where to go next?"

My mood soured a little more. I wondered how deranged Eilistraee had to be, to tell her Seer it was a good idea to put _me_ in charge of this stuff. "Mindflayers, undead, or beholders. Decisions, decisions." I kept my tone light. Better that way – if I let myself dwell on the reality of the situation, I'd stop laughing and start crying. "It's so hard to choose. They all sound just as bad."

Valen bent his head in acknowledgement. "Truth." He looked at me thoughtfully. "What of the undead? You are a priestess. Does your god grant you powers against the undead?"

I tried not to squirm in embarrassment. "I'm not that kind of priestess," I admitted reluctantly. "Never been able to turn so much as a zombie." I'd tried it once. All that'd happened was that the fucking thing had tried to eat my holy symbol, and also me. I'd slapped the shit out of it with Silent Partner and resolved never to try that again.

Valen accepted that with a surprisingly calm nod. "Beholders, then?"

"Maybe." It felt strange to discuss this so calmly. _Hey, so, we're going to walk into a nest of beholders. What should we pack for lunch? Pastrami sound good to you?_ "I can shield against magic," I said. "Not sure about beholder death rays. I never tried." I frowned. "Do you remember what all their eyes are supposed to do? I always forget."

Valen's husky voice fell into a strangely hypnotic cadence, for all the world as if he was reciting a poem. "One eye to lift and one eye to sleep," he said softly. "One to charm man and one for beast. One eye to wound and one eye to slow. One to bring fear and one to make stone..." At that verse, his recitation trailed off, and his voice returned to its normal tones – still silk over gravel, but not quite so hypnotic. "Gah. I forget the rest."

It took a couple of tries to figure out where my voice had gone off to. The man had missed his calling. He could have been a hell of a bard. "Guess we'll find out when they use it on us, whatever it is," I said weakly. "Hey, I know. How about we go with whatever's closest? At least that way we won't die footsore."

The tiefling huffed a brief, grim laugh. "Fair enough. Zorvak'mur is closest. And perhaps the mindflayers may be…reasoned with, at least. Certainly more than the undead or eye tyrants."

I frowned. "Won't the mindflayers be able to read our minds, though? Or suck our brains out?" I distinctly remembered reading something in Drogan's bestiary about mindflayers and brain-sucking. My brains weren't much, but they were all I had, and I would rather keep them inside my skull - and I _really_ didn't want any superintelligent tentacle monsters going through my brain and finding out about my home world. Earth had no magic and no experience with stuff like this. It was an easy target, and the fewer who knew about its existence, the better.

Valen's reply was not encouraging. "Yes, but Zorvak'mur is a trading outpost and the drow here do regular business with them. They must have some way to avoid such a fate." He frowned thoughtfully. "I shall ask a few people for insights. If all else fails, the Seer can open her war chest and we can buy our way onto a caravan."

He was awfully free with the Seer's money. Then again, wars were expensive, especially if you wanted to win them. "How far is it to Zorvak'mur?" I asked.

"Hard to say," Valen answered. "The trade caravans between here and there stop twice on the way to rest, so the equivalent of two or three days' march, I'd wager."

That meant six days, minimum, which meant we were better off leaving ourselves a solid tenday to deal with the usual delays and complications that inevitably came up on a trip like this. The only silver lining was that we wouldn't have to worry about the weather, though we'd have so many other things to worry about that the silver lining was whisker thin. We'd need trail rations, too, since we probably wouldn't be able to light a fire – Drogan always said there were nasty things in the Underdark that were attracted by light of any kind. _And that brings up another thing._ "How am I going to be able to see out there?" I asked. If I had a map to look at, my direction sense, and Shaundakul, I could probably find my way anywhere, but not if I couldn't _see_. "How dark is the Underdark, really?"

Valen frowned in thought. "Hellfire. I keep forgetting about that." He rubbed his chin. "It is not always truly dark, but there will be places which will be tricky for you to navigate, that is true."

He had to be pretty fucking forgetful, if he couldn't remember that I didn't have his glow-in-the-dark-eyes trick. "Well, good news is, I probably don't have to worry if I walk off of any cliffs," I joked.

Valen winced. "Perhaps, but I would still be happier if you could refrain from doing that," he grumbled. "I think I lost a year off of my life when I saw Aghaaz drop you, and it is not as if I have many years to spare."

A loud clatter made me jump. I realized it was Enserric. I'd dropped him in sheer surprise. "Oh. Uh." I searched for something to say. "S-sorry? I didn't mean to…" To what? Scare him? Valen wasn't scared of anything. Upset him? I didn't think he cared enough to get that upset, unless it had just been the prospect of having to tell the Seer her supposed savior had gone splat that had so spooked him.

Valen stared at the floor for a long moment. Then he spoke. "Actually, it is I who should be apologizing to you."

I'd run out of swords to drop. I settled for goggling semi-inertly. "Come again?"

Valen took a deep breath, as if preparing himself for some herculean task. "I have been stalling," he confessed. He clasped his hands, then unclasped them and let them fall by his sides. "I did not seek you out to spar, or to talk about our plans." His throat moved as he swallowed. "I…have been thinking about what you said to me. On the Maker's Isle." He drummed his fingers against the hilt of his flail, a nervous little riff. "You asked why you should trust me, when I did not trust you."

I stared at him, wondering where this was going. "And?"

"And you were right. Trust works both ways." Valen took another deep breath and turned to face me squarely. "That is why I wish to apologize," he announced, his words coming in a jumble as if he had to get them all out at once or not at all.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes before looking at him again. No – he was still there, with his face getting steadily redder the longer I stood and stared at him. "For what?" I asked. Not that I couldn't come up with a few things, but I wanted to hear this one from the horse's mouth.

"For not trusting you," Valen answered. He grimaced. "And for not being…entirely honest."

I opened my mouth to deliver some clever retort, but then I seemed to feel a set of ghostly knuckles rap my forehead, and the sharp words wilted in my throat. Judging by the color of his face, Valen was suffering enough. Besides, the Seer had told me that nice wasn't the same thing as good, but it occurred to me that if I really wanted to be either of those things, maybe I should start with not yelling at people who were apologizing to me. "Okay," I said. "I'm listening."

Valen's words came as if he had to drag them out one-by-one. "I said I did not trust you, but the truth is more complicated than that. The truth is that I…resented you. A little. I wanted to be the one to keep the Seer safe, and I had been working so long to keep the rebels alive that I did not want someone bursting in and taking all of the credit." He met my eyes briefly and looked away, his voice stiff. "Especially not some high-up lady, who might feel entitled to it."

A puzzle piece clicked into place. Despite my best efforts, my voice took on an edge. "You think I'm some kind of arrogant snob who thinks she deserves to be in charge of everything?"

Valen shook his head. "No, no, of course not." He hesitated. "At least…not _now_."

I hmph'ed. "So you _did_ think that."

The tiefling's tail thwacked into the bench in clear annoyance. "What was I to think? I knew nothing about you," he snapped. Then, as if trying to gather the scattered shards of his temper, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes and spoke again, his voice was softer. "I…do not have much experience with women of your social stature. When I was told of your background, I feared that you would look down on me, push me aside, or worse, try to tell me how to do my job. So I convinced myself you could not be trusted, that perhaps the Seer's vision was wrong." He paused for yet another deep breath. His voice softened further. "And yet you have proven yourself, again and again. You have even, to be fair, shown more trust in me than I have in you." He met my eyes gravely. "I am sorry that I have been so slow to return that trust, but I think..." He trailed off, thoughtful. When he spoke again, he sounded a little surprised. "Yes. I think that I trust you."

A jumble of emotions ran through me all at once, tangling together until I felt so snarled up I couldn't even begin to sort myself out. One feeling came through clear as day, though, and while I didn't really have a word for it, it made me think of an ice cube slowly melting in a tumbler of good scotch. "All right," I said. "Fine. You're off the hook-"

Valen blew out a relieved breath. His smile was faint, but it changed the skies in his eyes from winter in the mountains to summer at the beach. "I am glad."

I held up a forestalling hand. "-on one condition."

A little tension seemed to flow back into him. "Which is?"

If the man got any jumpier, he'd turn into a grasshopper. His armor was even the right color for it. "Enough with the 'Windwalker' this and 'my lady' that. I have a name. I want you to use it."

Valen's tension bled away again. His smile came back. Then, to my everlasting surprise, he gave me a short bow. "As you wish, Rebecca."

A hot, light feeling, like my heart had become a hot air balloon, made me laugh out loud. "All right. Fine. _Now_ you're forgiven." Blowing out a gusty breath, I looked at him sideways. "Wow. You seriously thought I was going to look down on you and try to boss you around?"

Valen offered an awkward shrug. "As I said, I do not have much experience with noble ladies, and what I do have is almost universally bad."

I remembered that hint of inner city swagger, and the way he'd said, 'my lady', like the words left a bad taste in his mouth. Another puzzle piece clicked into place. "So you're a poor boy from the 'hood, huh?" I looked at his expression and added, "From the bad part of the city. That's what they called it where I grew up, anyway."

He blinked. "Yes," he said, his tone a little cautious. "Where I come from, they call it the Hive." He looked at me curiously. "You grew up in a city, as well?"

 _Oops._ I coughed. "Yeah."

The tiefling's tail went briefly still, then curled into a sinuous question mark. "What city, if I might ask?"

 _Crap._ I needed some way to divert his attention. "You first," I countered, thinking fast. "You still owe me for all those times you called me 'my lady' and really meant 'you bitch'."

Valen's eyes went hot, as did his tone. "I did not."

"Fine," I said. I lifted my chin to stare him in the eyes. "Then look me in the eyes and tell me I'm wrong."

Valen's eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth. Then he snapped it shut, huffed an irritated breath, and looked away. "Very well," he grumbled. "Have it your way, Rebecca." An amused and slightly dangerous glint appeared in his bright blue eyes. "This time."

I smiled. _Diversion successful. For now._ "I will."

Valen's voice went dry. "I know. For all that you claim to have left your noble origins behind, you certainly act like a woman who is accustomed to getting what she wants."

I waved an exasperated hand at the bench next to me. "Oh, just shut up and sit."

A red eyebrow arched. "Case in point."

"Case in what point?"

"If you do not want me to call you 'my lady', perhaps you should stop giving me orders."

All right, so maybe he wasn't wrong. "Okay. Would you _please_ shut up and sit down?"

Valen rolled his eyes. Then, all at once, he relented, moving so swiftly and decisively that I barely had time to blink before he was there, sitting next to me with a graceful sideways sweep of his tail. "I am from Sigil," he told me. "Some call it the Cage. Most call it the City of Doors." He gave me a measuring stare. "Would I be correct in guessing that you've never heard of it?"

"You certainly would," I admitted cheerfully. "Never heard of it in my life. Where is it?"

Valen smiled his sparing half-smile. "It lies in the center of the planes, at the top of an infinite spire."

I held up a hand. "Wait. That makes no sense. How can an infinite spire have a top?"

The half-smile became a mischievous little smirk. "Ah." The man leaned back, although even in that relatively relaxed pose, even in what was probably the safest place in the city, he _still_ kept his hand on his flail's hilt – his left hand, I noticed, now that I was looking for it. So he hadn't _totally_ trained himself out of his left-handedness. "As to that, countless generations of philosophers have spent countless hours getting incredibly drunk in taverns all over the multiverse while arguing over that very question."

"Have they ever come up with an answer?"

"No, but they have had some legendary brawls."

I laughed at that. "Sounds like that might be fun to watch."

Valen quirked an eyebrow at me. "You have a peculiar definition of fun."

I shrugged. "Spent too much time around dwarves and Uthgardt, I guess." I felt a painful pang at the thought of my friends on the surface, but the only thing I could do for them right now was survive so I could get back to them, so I pushed the pang away and turned my attention to Valen. "So, what's your city like? Tell me about it."

Valen's expression became wistful. "It is…impossible to describe."

"Try." I wanted to hear this. Sigil sounded more like a fever dream than a real place.

Valen paused, seeming to gather his thoughts. "It is an odd place," he said at last. "Beautiful and hideous and dangerous and all in-between." He smiled the reminiscent little smile of a man who'd just been mugged on Memory Lane. "And it is a glorious mess. Chaos, in the guise of a city. It is the nexus of trade and travel throughout the multiverse, and beings from every Plane of existence walk its streets. It is a place where mortals mingle with planars, devas rub shoulders with baatezu, planewalkers pass through on the way from one world to another, and strange weather blows in from the Elemental Planes."

I let his words, and the crazy images they painted, sink in, savoring them. "That's so wild," I breathed. Then I blinked, confusion suddenly dropping an ice cube down the back of fascination's shirt. "But I don't get it. I thought the universe – sorry, multiverse – was huge."

Valen shook his head. "Not huge," he corrected me. "Infinite."

"And now you're making even less sense. How can you be in the middle of infinity, any more than you can be at the top?"

Valen frowned reluctantly. "I do not know if Sigil sits at a literal, physical center of the Planes," he admitted. "It might be better to say that it acts as a hub because it touches on all the planes but belongs to none – thus, Sigil can be reached from everywhere and everywhere can be reached from Sigil."

I couldn't see my own face, but I was pretty sure my expression painted a picture, and its title was 'Confusion'. "That makes no sense, either. How does it touch on all the planes if it's not in any of them?"

"Portals, of course," Valen answered archly. "Sigil is home to innumerable portals, thus its nickname-"

Something clicked in my head. I finished the sentence for him. "-the City of Doors."

He was nodding. "Yes." He raised a precautionary finger. "But there is a danger there, because in Sigil, few portals are fixed. Most appear or disappear or shift to new locations more or less constantly, so one never knows where a portal might be hiding. To confound the issue, any bounded space can be a portal. A doorway, an arch, a window-"

 _To enter the portal, hold a shard of glass in your left hand and a blade of grass in your right._ My voice was quiet. "A picture frame?"

Valen paused, then cocked his head in a thoughtful half-nod. "For example."

Puzzle pieces were falling like a flurry. I jerked upright. " _That's_ why you're so nervous about doorways!" I shouted triumphantly. "You think they might be portals!"

He looked at my expression. His lips twitched. "Yes. Now you understand." He shrugged. "I suppose the risks of running afoul of a random portal are much less, here, but old habits die hard. I have been away from Sigil for a long time, but my skin still crawls when I see a doorway standing where no doorway should be."

I slouched back again, grinning. "That's insane. So, if you lived in Sigil, you could get up in the morning, walk into the bathroom, and find yourself in…" I groped for a name of one of the Planes he'd mentioned. "I don't know. Arcadia?"

Valen made a face. "That would be a rude awakening. But I suppose it is always a possibility, yes." Suddenly, he chuckled. "And Arcadia is likely to be one of the better options. Imagine, instead, that your bathtub had become a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water."

"Mmh. Sounds bad."

"Given that you would drown almost instantly unless you had prepared some kind of water breathing enchantment? Yes."

"Wow. Sigil sounds like a hell of a place." My smile was tinged with envy. "You probably saw some amazing things when you were growing up." No wonder he acted so jaded sometimes. He'd probably seen all there was to see before he'd lost his baby teeth. "This world must be pretty dull for you."

Valen grimaced. "On the contrary. It has never ceased to surprise me." He paused and his eyes lost focus for a moment, as if he was collecting his thoughts. "When I first came here, I thought my experiences on the Planes would render me harder to take advantage of. Instead, they made matters worse. I had no idea what to expect of this world, and to a planar such as myself, it seemed very strange. However, I knew that the multiverse can be a very strange place, and so I found myself accepting some very strange stories without question."

I cocked my head. "So someone could've sold you a pound of cheese and called it gold and you'd have figured, hey, could be true, maybe the gold on this world just smells like cheddar?"

Valen winced, his cheeks going a little pink. "That is a distressingly accurate description," he muttered. "There was…an encounter I had while I was searching for the Seer. I stumbled across an ogre wizardess who led a band of hobgoblins. They claimed to be innocent travelers, set upon by thieves. At the time, I knew nothing about your world, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and agreed to help them."

"Ogres aren't generally nice," I observed. "Now, there's an exception to every rule, but…"

"Not in this case, unfortunately." Valen's voice was grim. "As it turned out, this so-called thief was a paladin. He attacked, and by the time I thought to question him and discover the truth, he was already injured and convinced I was as evil as the ogress." The tiefling sighed. "I was forced to kill him, or else he would have done his best to kill me." He eyed me, his face red. "I suppose you will say I was naïve."

I studied my fingernails, avoiding his eyes. "No," I said at last, my voice distant. "No. I can totally understand how you might make that mistake."

I felt his stare on me. "You can?"

"Yeah. I get it." A strange, dizzy feeling of relief was building in me. Finally, someone else who _got_ it. No one else did. Everyone else I'd met here was _from_ here. "I really do." But we were getting into dangerous territory. I shifted position a little – the damn bench was rock hard and obviously not made to encourage people to linger - and I changed the subject. "You seem to have adapted well enough, though. You even speak drowish."

Valen sighed. "I have adapted to the Seer and her people, perhaps, but to be honest, once I found them, I have not dared to venture out of their company."

It was hard to imagine Valen turning down a challenge. "Really? Why not?"

He looked down, frowning. "This world is…different from what I am used to. In Sigil, tieflings are as common a sight as the cobblestones, and while we are not trusted, we are tolerated. Or ignored."

I looked at him, with his brilliant blue eyes and rich red hair and sculpted alabaster face, and wondered how anyone with eyes could ignore him. "And here?"

He sighed. "Here…people do not always know what a tiefling is, but my appearance is enough to make most people react with fear, even hostility. I have learned to avoid people. It is simpler." He touched one of his horns and lifted one shoulder in a moody half-shrug. "Once I found the Seer, things improved," he added, as if not getting chased by pitchfork-wielding mobs was a step up, for him. "Her people hide from surfacers, and I have been able to hide along with them. Until recently, it was not an exciting life – but then, I have seen a great deal of excitement in my life, most of it unpleasant, so I did not mind the reprieve."

I studied his face. He said he'd been living on the surface, but his complexion looked like it had never seen the sun. Maybe the drow only came out at night. "How long have you been here? In this world, I mean."

He paused, then shrugged. "A few years. Three or four, perhaps. I cannot be sure. I…have never been good at keeping track of time."

He'd been here about as long as I had, then. "You mind hearing an opinion?" I offered.

Valen's expression turned curious. "Go ahead."

"This is a pretty nice world." There were no real cities, but the vast, pristine landscapes and the weird and wonderful places hidden within them went a long way to making up for that. "I think it's worth seeing. Maybe, after this is over, you could give it another try. I'm sure that if you do your homework, you can find places to go where you won't get too much hassle for being a tiefling."

The tiefling in question tilted his head, considering. "You have seen a great deal of this world, have you not? Perhaps you might tell me where you have been." His little smile was almost shy. "That way I might have some idea of where to go."

That ice-cube-in-good-scotch feeling was back. Impulsively, I jumped to my feet. "I'll do you one better. Help me find a map, and I'll show you."

Valen sprang to his feet, as well. "There should be one in the library, somewhere."

I was already heading for the door. "Let's go look."

The library was empty, fortunately. Unfortunately, that made the map even harder to find. We finally found it wedged underneath a chair at the end of a length of shelving that looked like it hadn't been disturbed since Myth Drannor fell. Valen cleared a table by the simple expedient of grabbing a pile of books and throwing them onto the nearest chair in a way that would have given Xanos an aneurysm. While he did that, I unrolled the map, smoothing it flat and weighting its curling corners down with more books. The map's colors were crisp and bright. It was either new, or old but barely used. "All right," I said. "What would you like to see?"

Valen leaned over the map. His fingers traced coastlines and mountains with evident fascination, though they lingered more over the coastlines and eventually settled on the Sea of Fallen Stars. "This looks like an inland sea. Have you ever been there?"

"Just to the lake on the western side." I touched the blue-ink leaf shape of the Dragonmere. "I visited Suzail. That town you see on the north side. That was before I crossed the Stormhorns-" I tapped a mountain range that curled around the Dragonmere's northernwestern coast like a sleeping cat. "-here."

Valen's eyes followed the path of my hand. "A shame," he murmured. "I have heard of this world's oceans, but I have never seen one. There are oceans in the Abyss, but they are…not what you might call picturesque. Or peaceful."

I felt a moment's surprise. Then I smiled. "So it's oceans you want, huh?" I wouldn't have taken him for a beach bum, not with his lily white complexion and complete lack of chill, but if anyone needed a long, relaxing vacation with lots of naps and pina coladas and absolutely no demons, devils, or drow, it would be him. "All right. Let's find you an ocean." I leaned over the map, hunting for coastlines. "We're probably closest to the Sea of Swords right now." My fingers walked west. "Not many beaches, but there's this beautiful rocky shore all the way down to Baldur's Gate." My fingers stopped at the 'Gate. "Just came back from that area, actually. Took passage on a gnome steamship bound for Athkatla out of Port Castigliar." I made a face. "Now _that_ was a mistake I won't be repeating."

From the expression of pained dismay on Valen's face, he knew exactly why I'd called it a mistake. "A gnome steamship? Those exist here?"

"Yeah. They'd just lost their navigator. Seems he'd been trying to invent a pair of shoes that would take him to the crow's nest in one jump, only he added too much of the wrong powder, and _boom_! No more navigator."

Valen winced. "And you took his place?"

"'Fraid so. It was a long two months. There were a few times when I found myself thinking sharks weren't so bad, and a few hundred miles wasn't really _that_ much of a swim."

He chuckled. "I think I know the feeling. There used to be a gnome inventor who had a workshop in the Hive. Sometimes, anyway."

"Sometimes?"

"It exploded on a semi-regular basis."

I pursed my lips. "Yeah. That sounds about right." I turned back to the map and tapped the crescent-shaped city on the western coast. "Luckily, nobody else blew up on that trip, and we safely put into port in Baldur's Gate. Nice city. Not huge-" Not by my standards, but then, by my standards, the cities here weren't even cities. "-but big enough to be interesting. There's a museum in the temple to Gond, called the Hall of Wonders. It's open to the public, as long as you sign a form stating that if you touch anything, whatever happens to you is your own damn fault." The technological wonders there hadn't been all that wondrous, but the museum tour had still been an interesting way to spend an afternoon. My fingers drifted south. "Athkatla's nice, too. You know what they say about Athkatla?"

Valen raised his eyebrows. "No. What?"

"It's like an efreeti whore – hot, filthy, and incredibly expensive."

A startled splutter, a laugh-half arrested, escaped him. He looked away, blushing. "I…think I understand."

I grinned at his expression. "They also call it the City of Coin. Fun place. Just about anything goes, though, so watch your back. The authorities won't." Luckily, I'd arrived on a merchant's caravan, and in exchange for my services as a guide, I'd gotten a few good pointers on what to do – and what not to do – in the City of Coin. My grin faded as a thought struck me. "I wouldn't go there, though, if I were you. Athkatla's bad for non-humans, and Calimport's worse."

"So what city would you go to, if you were me?"

"If I were you and I wanted to see a surface city?" I tapped the western edge of the Nether Mountains. "I'd try Silverymoon first. They pride themselves on their open-mindedness and won't turn away anybody, as long as you're not looking to steal anything or kill anyone. But you're not, so I'm sure they'd give you a chance."

Valen studied the map. His face was as unsmiling as ever, but his posture was as easy as I'd ever seen it, and his eyes were bright and intent. "Then I must go," he breathed. He looked up at me. "Is that where you are from? Silverymoon?"

I hesitated, then cursed myself for hesitating. "No. Although I've been there a couple of times. I spent a year or so in the Nether Mountains – that range you see to the east." The memory of Drogan made sadness well in my throat, choking my voice a little. "My teacher lived there. He was a retired Harper. Ran a school for adventurers."

"Was?"

"He died."

Valen's face softened a little. "Oh. I am sorry."

I swallowed. In my memory, I heard the crash of falling stone. "Thanks." My eyes moved east. My heart clenched. "And here's the Anauroch. Where Undrentide was."

The tiefling frowned and leaned a little closer to the map. "Was?"

"Still is, I suppose. It didn't disappear. It just crash-landed." Further east, then, and my voice got quieter. "And here's Myth Drannor. That's where Shaundakul lives."

Valen's voice was startled. "Lives? He physically dwells in this world?"

"Yeah." My fingers brushed the spot in the forests of Cormanthor where the ruined city lay. "Guess he likes this world as much as we do."

The tiefling raised his eyebrows. "You have an unusual god. Most prefer not to manifest on the Prime unless necessary."

I bowed my head a little. "Maybe he is a little unusual." Shaundakul definitely had strange ideas about who made for a good follower, that was for sure. "Anyway. I've never actually been to Myth Drannor. It got destroyed by a demon army a few hundred years ago. It's still pretty dangerous. One day, I'll make the trip."

I felt Valen's eyes on me. "From which I might conclude that you do not come from Myth Drannor, either."

I stared at the map. "No." Idly, I brushed my fingers over the parts of the map I'd never been to. I hoped the Valsharess didn't kill me. There was still so much left to see. "My usual stomping ground is the Sword Coast." My finger drew a rough circle around the area. "Here."

Valen inspected the area. "What is the biggest city in the region?"

My hand moved to the western coast and tapped a solitary mountain there, at the mouth of the Dessarin. "That'd be Waterdeep." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his mouth open, on the verge of another question. I winced and held up a hand to forestall him. "And no, I'm not from there, either. If that's what you were about to ask."

Valen was staring at me. I couldn't see what his tail was doing, but I couldn't hear it whisking against his calves, which implied that it had gone still. Not a good sign. I'd only ever seen that happen when he was really bothered by something. "Very well," he said slowly. "Where are you from, then?"

Outside, I kept my face still. Inside, I cursed. _I should have just lied and told him I was from Waterdeep_. I didn't know why I hadn't. I just felt tired all of the sudden. Keeping secrets was exhausting, especially from your friends, and I'd been doing that for a while now. Deeks had even yelled at me for it, and if I'd done something to make the happy-go-lucky little bard raise his voice at me then that was probably a good sign that whatever I'd done was a bad idea.

Four people in this world knew my secret, and one was dead. Teddy had deduced it. Drogan had pried it out of me. Xanos and Deekin knew, too, but they didn't really _know._ They didn't know how very different my old world was from theirs. They didn't know what it was like to be such a complete outsider, not even Xanos. They didn't _get_ it.

 _Valen does,_ my treacherous brain whispered. _He's even more of an outsider here than me. At least I look like a normal human._

 _He_ was watching me. His face had gone suspicious. And so soon after he'd decided he could maybe trust me, too. "Rebecca?"

I was tired. I was tired of lying, and tired of feeling alone even when I was surrounded by people, and anyway I probably knew more about Valen than he knew about me. Fair was fair, and trust worked both ways.

I took a long, bracing breath, as if I were about to dive into deep water. "All right." I hoped I wasn't about to make a terrible mistake. "All right. I'll tell you where my city is." I nodded at the table. "You see this map?"

Valen gave it a wary sidelong glance, then returned his eyes to me, his stare probing. "Yes."

I pointed. "Look at the map," I insisted. "Are you looking at it?"

I heard the telltale sound of a tail irritably whapping against a leg. Reluctantly, Valen looked. "Yes," he growled.

I nodded. "Okay. Good." Then I rolled up the map and tossed it over my shoulder. "In that case, you can stop looking."

Valen's head turned to follow the map's fall. Naked bewilderment was painted all over his face. "What-"

I took a deep breath and hugged my arms to my chest, mostly because I felt like my heart was about to burst right out of it. "My city's not on that map," I said. "Or any other map of this world, for that matter."

Valen's eyes had started to widen in realization. "Because…" he prompted slowly.

I had to pry my teeth apart to speak. They wanted to chatter. "Because it's not in this world." I met his electric blue eyes, now wide with shock, and offered him a sheepish grin. "Surprise?"


	36. A Tale of Two Cities

_A/N: Might be a couple of weeks for the next one, but I wanted to get this chapter up ASAP so I didn't leave y'all hanging TOO long. Enjoy!  
_

* * *

 _Take me down to the paradise city  
_ _Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty  
_ _Oh, won't you please take me home_

\- Guns N' Roses, "Paradise City"

 _One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood._

\- Seneca

~*~  
Chapter 36: A Tale of Two Cities  
~*~

Valen stared at me. His lips were parted in an expression of thunderstuck comprehension, as if a giant clue had just fallen from the sky and hit him right between the eyes. "Where in the Planes are you from?" he breathed.

I knew I looked defensive and insecure, with my arms crossed over my chest as tightly as they were, but I couldn't make them unfold. "Another world. On the Prime. Called Earth."

Blue eyes searched my face, inch by inch. "Truly?"

I nodded without speaking. I didn't _trust_ myself to speak. My pulse was galloping like a racehorse. Valen had only just decided to trust me. What if I'd just screwed it up somehow by telling him about this? I didn't know how that might happen, but that didn't matter. I'd screwed up plenty of stuff without realizing it. And if I had just screwed up and things got really awkward, I couldn't even skip town, not with the geas on me and the Valsharess after me. I was going to have to stay and _face_ the awkwardness, which was so not my strong suit. I was a lot better at cutting my losses and running for the hills.

This had been _such_ a stupid idea.

Valen's rapt stare morphed into a frown. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," I said. Then: "No. I think I need to sit down." I made my way to the nearest sofa, where I fell more than I sat. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone about this. Almost no one else knows, and I'd like to keep it that way." I swallowed. "The last thing my world needs is to have someone like the Valsharess knocking on its door."

Valen replied at once. "Of course. Your secret is safe with me, I swear it." He hesitated. "And…thank you."

My eyes flashed up to his before I could stop them. "F-for what?"

He smiled at me, a gentle little smile that momentarily chased all the sternness from his face. "For trusting me with your secret." He almost sounded _pleased_ , like I'd just given him a nice present. "If so few people are privy to it, then I am flattered that you chose to make me one of them."

I almost gasped with relief. _He's not upset?_ My pulse slowed from a gallop to a canter. "Don't feel too flattered," I tried to joke. "Deekin's one of the others."

Valen's smile didn't budge. "You and he are old comrades. You and I are not, yet you trusted me all the same." Slowly, as if he was afraid he might spook me, he sat down next to me. "You are more widely-traveled than I thought."

I shrugged. "What can I say?" I kept my voice light. _Turn it into a joke. Don't get too worked up._ "I don't do things by halves."

"No. You do not. You taunt powerful beings like Aghaaz until they fly into a blind rage and try to tear you limb from limb, because why risk death when you can also risk dismemberment?"

I gave him a beleaguered scowl. "You're never going to let me live that down, are you?"

His voice was light, dry, and just a teensy bit acidic, like a good white wine. "Ask me again at the end of time, and I shall let you know."

I shifted a little in my seat. "Maybe I can be a little impulsive sometimes," I conceded at last.

One red eyebrow shot up. "A little?"

My scowl deepened. "I'm sorry you disapprove."

Valen's voice was unexpectedly mild. "Who said that I disapprove? I am a tiefling with demon's blood. I have done things that make your confrontation with Aghaaz look sane." He paused. "And it was well done, in the end," he added. He made a rueful face. "I do not think I would have gotten the same outcome."

My defensiveness gave way to curiosity. "How so?"

Valen shrugged. "I would either have killed Aghaaz and his followers without discussion, or I would have deemed it too risky and left the golems to their fates rather than leave the Seer and her people less two allies," he admitted. "I doubt I would even have had the patience to look for a third way. You did, and it won the golems to our side."

I waved a hand as if waving a fly away from my face. "I wasn't trying to _win_ them, I was just…" The right word wouldn't come. What _had_ I been trying to do?

Valen raised an eyebrow. "Just?"

I shrugged and flushed. "Just…trying to do the right thing, I guess."

At that, Valen smiled. "I think you succeeded."

I tried not to stare. Had he hit his head? I'd done as much harm as good down there. "If you say so," I said dubiously. Then, since he'd given me the opening, though, I decided to steer the subject away from my bad ideas and towards his bad ideas. Fair was fair. "Speaking of crazy ideas, what kinds of crazy things have _you_ done?"

Valen was silent for a long second. Then he shrugged, as if he'd decided it wouldn't hurt to answer. "Charged into battle against impossible odds, for the most part." He rubbed his chin. All of the sudden, a smile made his eyes flash. "Though….there was another time when I was very young and still living in Sigil when I thought it might be a good idea to thorn a firbolg, so that my friend could lift the firbolg's purse with him none the wiser."

I blinked. "Sorry. What's a firbolg, and how do you thorn it?"

Valen blinked, too. Then he winced. "I apologize. People in Sigil do not speak quite the same way as the people here. I try to speak like a local, but sometimes I slip up."

My pulse slowed further, from a canter to a trot. A bizarre feeling of relief flooded me. "Oh, gods, yes. I know _that_ feeling."

Valen's smile was coming back, a little. "I thought you might. You do not speak like anyone else I have met in this world." His smile warmed his eyes. "Now I know why."

The corner of my mouth crooked up in an answering smile. "So you do."

"Yes. So I do." We smiled at each other for a moment longer. Then Valen looked down and cleared his throat. His tone turned brisk. "To answer your question, to thorn someone is to annoy them. And a firbolg is a kind of giant-kin."

A laugh burst out of my throat. "You ticked off a giant? Intentionally? So you could steal his money? And _you_ yelled at _me_ for what I did to Aghaaz?"

Valen flushed. "Giant-kin, not a giant," he corrected, his voice a little defensive. "He was smaller than Aghaaz." He shrugged, his tone turning grim. "Besides, I was an orphan in the Hive – the slums of Sigil. To me, that purse could have meant the difference between living another day or becoming just another corpse clogging the gutters."

"And I had a golem out for my blood," I argued. "If I hadn't made him so mad he couldn't think straight, _I'd_ have been a corpse."

Valen gave me a startled look, which quickly settled into thoughtfulness. "You have a point," he conceded. "Very well. Shall we agree that both of us have done irrational things, and both of us have had our reasons to do so?"

I mulled that over. "Seems fair."

Valen smiled briefly. "Good." He leaned back, his face pensive. "At any rate, I drew the firbolg's attention with a few insults, but perhaps I chose my insults a little too well. He was so enraged that not only did he not notice my friend _or_ his missing jink, but ended up chasing me down the street." He smirked suddenly. "Several streets, actually. I knew those streets and alleyways well, so I was certain I'd be able to give him the laugh, but what he lacked in brains he made up for in leg length, and somehow he kept pace."

I tried to picture the scene. It strained my imagination. "How'd you get away?"

Valen's smirk widened. His voice took on a slightly impish note. "I led him into an ooze puddle."

"A what?"

"An ooze puddle." Valen looked at my face and elaborated. "They look like mud puddles, but they are actually randomly-occurring portals to the Para-Elemental Plane of Ooze. They are indistinguishable from normal mud puddles unless you are very close to them – or a native-born Hiver, like me, who knows how to tell the difference." He chuckled humorlessly. "Or unless you step into them, in which case you are sucked into the Ooze Plane."

I winced. "Ew."

The tiefling's shrug was fatalistic. "There are a thousand ways to die in Sigil, and a million ways to die in the Hive. All told, that is one of the easier ways to go." He swept a hand to one side, as if brushing away such morbid thoughts. "At any rate, I saw the ooze puddle in time and jumped over it. The firbolg did not."

I put two and two together. "He got sucked in?"

Valen's smirk turned a little smug. "Yes."

I blinked. "Clever. Gross. But clever."

He lifted his shoulders in another one of those fatalistic shrugs. "Better him than me."

"That's one way to look at it."

"It was how I saw it then." Valen frowned, then added, "I do not think I would do such a thing now, if I could avoid it. But at the time…" He trailed off and shrugged again. "It was better than starving to death."

That smirk of his had been so brief, like a flash in the pan. "What were you doing robbing giant-kin, anyway?" I asked. "I thought you were more of the close combat type."

"Not back then." A note of peculiar pride appeared in Valen's voice. "Back then, I was one of the finest urchin pickpockets in the Hive."

I stared at him. "You? A pickpocket?" I had to swallow a laugh. "No wonder you had to go for the giants. Everybody else would have seen you coming from a mile away."

A blush bloomed in Valen's cheeks. "I was small and scrawny at that age," he admitted, his voice stiff. "If you must know."

I gauged the breadth of his shoulders from the corner of my eye. _That_ kind of muscle didn't turn up overnight. "Must have been a really long time ago."

Valen's blush deepened. "I…suppose so." He shifted in his seat. "My street rat days are long past, certainly," he went on, his tone dismissive. "I do not even remember most of my old tricks." Suddenly, he turned a curious stare on me. "And you? What was your city like?"

His question threw me for a loop. It took me a long time to answer. "Huge," I said, when I'd found words again. "Filthy. Hectic." A beatific smile spread over my face. "Beautiful."

Valen leaned forward a little, his eyes glued to my face. "Where was it? What did it look like?"

I tried to think of the words to describe it. "Metal. Glass. Stone. And light, so much light you wouldn't believe it," I said at last. "It was one thing by day, but I liked it most at night. At night, it lit up the whole horizon."

Skepticism was painted all over the tiefling's face. "Was it truly so vast?"

I frowned at him. "What, you don't believe me?"

He shrugged. "I simply find it unlikely that any city on the Prime could match Sigil in size," he said. His eyes glinted. "Much less beat it."

I sat up. "Oh," I breathed. "You wanna bet, big man?"

Valen turned a little in his seat. His eyes narrowed, and down near the leg of the sofa, the tip of his tail twitched, a quick, eager little back-and-forth. "That would be unfair to you," he demurred, but there was a note of challenge in his voice. "The odds, I fear, are very much against you."

I smirked. "Don't be so sure." I pointed a finger at him. "How many people live in Sigil?"

"Permanent residents, you mean?" Valen frowned in thought. "I do not know the exact number, but at least a million, perhaps two – and twice that if you count visiting planars, planewalkers, and tourists."

 _Tourists?_ Now _that_ was a term I hadn't heard since I'd left home. "Yeah, well, my city's got close to eight million, and that's just the residents." I shrugged. "Something like that, anyway. Been a while since I looked at the census figures."

Valen's head tilted very slowly, as if this was the only way for him to get this news into his brain. "What? How do you even _fit_ that many people into one city?"

I grinned. "You stack 'em high." I remembered the pattern the city lights had made on the wall of my bedroom, and the way they'd rolled out before me, like stars. "I lived on the forty-second floor of my building, right at the top, but there are some buildings that are close to a hundred stories high."

Valen looked impressed, which was impressive all by itself. He wasn't somebody who impressed easily. "I…must admit, there are no buildings so tall in Sigil." His concession sounded like he'd had to wring it out of his tongue. "It must take powerful magic to build such structures."

I hesitated. Then my tongue slipped the leash of caution, dodged my better judgement, and ran away, hand-in-hand, with my good sense. "Not magic. Machines. There's no magic in my old world. Not that anyone knows about, anyway."

The tiefling frowned thoughtfully. "How strange," he murmured. He rubbed his chin. "I wonder. Is your world a dead-magic zone, like much of the Outlands? Does it lie alongside them? Perhaps it even borders the Outlands at the juncture with Mechanus. That might explain…" He trailed off, his eyes bright with speculation.

I shook my head a little, as if I could shake off his speculation. I didn't see how it mattered. I was never going back there, anyway. "I don't know. All I know is that I didn't believe in magic until I met a gnome wizard who decided to prove its existence by blowing up some trees with a fireball."

Valen turned his head away, clearing his throat in a way that sounded suspiciously like the beginnings of a laugh. "Oh."

I chuckled. "Yeah. I spent the next few days damn near jumping out of my skin every time he raised his hand." I found words pouring off of my tongue, as if they'd been held behind a dam all this time, just waiting for the dam to burst, and now that it had I couldn't seem to patch it back together fast enough. "And that ogress you met? I wouldn't even have known what to do with her. Forget fighting. I'd never even held a weapon in my life."

Valen looked at me sharply. "But you had access to divine power, did you not?"

"No," I confessed, my tongue still seized by this strange new fit of honesty. Had the Seer put something in my tea last night? "That only happened after I came here."

Valen went still. "How long ago _did_ you come here?"

"About four years ago." I shrugged, avoiding his eyes. Maybe I shouldn't have admitted all that. He was the best fighter I'd ever seen, and while he knew damn well that I was no match for him, maybe I shouldn't have let him in on the truth of how inexperienced I really was. "Give or take. You aren't the only one who lost track of time."

Valen was silent for a long time. I was starting to give serious thought to just jumping up and running away when he spoke again. "You are full of surprises, aren't you?" he said at last.

 _Hoo boy. Hope it's not bad surprises, but I think it might be_. I gulped. "W-what? In what way?"

Valen was looking at me as if seeing me for the first time. "You came to a world you knew nothing about, with no skill in combat and no magic at your disposal." He shook his head. "All over the multiverse, even as we speak, countless people are being thrust into situations not unlike yours, snatched away from their homes by malice or circumstance or even their own stupidity and left to stumble lost and alone through dangers they barely understand, much less know how to face. Do you know what happens to those people?" His voice had gone flat, emotionless. "They die, often horribly. I know, because I have seen it happen, time and time again." He looked at me again, some warmth coming back to his eyes. "You, on the other hand, survived. That is…unusual, to say the least."

I flushed. "I was lucky, that's all," I protested. "And I had a lot of help. Hell, I still do."

Valen dismissed my protestation with a peremptory wave of his hand. "True, and no doubt that is a part of it, but luck and help only go so far." He touched the hilt of his flail, briefly. "I would not have survived the Abyss without my skill as a warrior, not for all the luck in the world. And while the Seer has helped me find my humanity again, you were right when you said that she could not have helped me had I not realized I needed the help and sought it out. She opened the door, but I was the one to step through it." He studied me, his head to one side. "I think it was the same with you. Your friends opened the door, but you could just as easily have given up and died, or spent the rest of your life..." Valen gestured helplessly. "I do not know. Herding sheep, perhaps."

I spluttered. "A shepherdess? Me? Standing around all day with nobody but sheep to talk to? Are you out of your mind?"

Valen spoke in the overly patient voice of someone who was losing his patience. "My _point_ is that you did not have to take up adventuring. You could have…" He seemed to grope for ideas. "You could have become a farmer and grown…plants. Of some kind."

He was a city boy, all right. He had a city boy's grasp of agriculture. My laughter bubbled up again. "Sorry. I'm allergic to manual labor."

Valen persisted. "Then you might have worked as a barmaid-"

"I'd drink all the liquor and punch the first man who called me 'sweetheart'."

That got a quick bark of laughter, quickly suppressed. "Fine. A shopkeeper?"

"I'm bad at math."

"A seamstress."

"Have you _seen_ how I dress?"

Valen had that look of beleaguered amusement on his face again. "Are you truly trying to tell me that you took up adventuring because all of the other jobs were too hard?'

I thought about that. "Yeah. Or too boring."

Valen looked at me oddly, then shook his head. "You are an exceedingly strange woman."

"How so?"

"How so? You saved a world out of _boredom_."

I scowled. "I didn't mean to save anything. It was an accident."

"An accident?" Valen repeated incredulously. "How do you save a world by accident?"

Everyone kept asking me this question. "If I knew, it wouldn't be an accident, now would it?"

Valen stared at me. One corner of his mouth went up, then down again. "You know, I cannot even argue with that." He studied me reflectively. "Was that what brought you to this world? An accident?"

I bit my lip, and I really should have bitten it clean off, because maybe that would have stopped me from blurting, "No. I left on purpose." I paused. My voice went weak. "Um. Sort of. My life was…a mess." I looked down, suddenly unable to meet his eyes as the memories of all the ways in which I'd screwed up came flooding back. "My fault, mostly. I made some bad decisions. Then my father died." More memories, worse ones, hit me. It was hard to contain my flinch. "After that, my bad decisions finally caught up with me. I lost everything. It was around that time that a portal showed up in the park, near where I used to live." I lifted one shoulder in a shrug that I hoped looked nonchalant. _Nothing to see here. Move along._ "I walked through it."

"Did you know where it led?"

"No."

Valen's face was pensive. "A person would have to be either utterly foolish or utterly desperate, to walk through a portal without knowing what was on the other side." The way his eyes searched mine asked the question, _'Which one were you?'_.

I laughed nervously and edged past the unspoken question. "Well, as it turns out, there was an Ilmateri monk on the other side of the portal. He took me under his wing. Taught me some basic survival skills. Saved my life, more than once." Surreptitiously, I turned my face away and swiped a fingertip beneath my lower eyelashes before continuing. To have the man who'd survived the Abyss see me blubber like a little girl would just be the ultimate humiliation to cap this all off. "He died, though. Bandits. I took his quarterstaff – the one I told you about. I didn't want his weapon to end up in the wrong hands. He was a good person. One of the best I've ever known. He wouldn't have wanted his weapon used to hurt innocent people." My jaw tightened. I felt my teeth grinding. "Then the Valsharess stole it. So much for that idea."

Emotions flitted across Valen's face, first comprehension then sympathy. "I am sorry," he said quietly. "I was certain that your old weapon was important to you, but I had no idea how important."

Hot tears momentarily blinded me. I turned my face again and dashed them away before they got anywhere. "It's fine." My voice was curt. I hadn't wanted it to be, but it came out that way anyway. "I'm mostly just angry at myself. I promised I'd take care of it."

Valen stared at me. "It is not your fault that it was stolen," he flared. Anger was the next emotion to crowd across his face. It made his eyes flash cherry red, for an instant. "It is hers. Had I known-" Abruptly, he stood. His fingers flexed on the hilt of his weapon and his tail whipped back and forth as he paced. "And you blame yourself?" he growled. He slashed his free hand through the air. "Bar that. You did nothing wrong."

I scowled. "Bullshit," I countered. "I could have kept a closer eye on it. Hell, I could've slept with it-"

Valen rolled his eyes. "Yes, and why not take things a step further? Why not just have the sodding thing surgically grafted to your hand?"

I stared at him, my own upset driven right out of my mind by his outburst. Then the absurdity of his words hit me. Laughter rose in my throat. "Well, that would pretty stupid, wouldn't it?"

Valen's glower didn't seem to be so much directed at me so much as at the room itself, just in general. Or maybe the universe. Multiverse. Whatever. "That would be my _point_ ," he rasped.

I went on blithely. "Right. I mean, how would I even scratch my ass? With my luck, I'd probably reach down there one day and not be paying attention and then, _bam!_ " I made an illustrative motion. "Right where the sun don't shine."

Valen stopped pacing and spun on his heel to stare at me. His face went through a complicated series of expressions, as if it didn't know which one to pick so had to try all of them before it could decide.

Then a startled splutter burst out of him, and another, and just like that he was burying his face in one hand and his shoulders were shaking and he was….

 _He's laughing._ I realized that my mouth was hanging open. I shut it. Valen was actually honest-to-god _laughing_. Granted, his laugh was so breathy and husky and soft that I could've been forgiven if I mistook it for an asthma attack, and he had a way of looking down when he laughed that effectively hid his expression even without his hand in the way, but the sound coming out of him was still, unmistakeably, laughter.

It was also some kind of beautiful, in the same way the first real day of spring after a long, cold winter was beautiful. How he could still laugh like that after all the shit he'd been through was beyond me, but the stars were beyond me, too – that didn't mean I couldn't appreciate their shine.

Eventually - too quickly – Valen's laughter subsided. "I saw a spined devil do that once," he said breathlessly.

I collected my chin from my lap. "Uh." I said. Words skittered away from me. I tried to track them down again. "What? It shoved a quarterstaff up its own-"

Another ripple of laughter escaped him. "No. It sat on one of its own spines."

I kept staring. "You're seriously telling me that there are devils who are so pointy they can't even sit without-"

"Oh, that one sat."

"Oh."

Valen snickered. "Just not for long."

I stared at him half-a-heartbeat longer. Then I started laughing, too. "Hey! I think we've just come up with a way to get rid of that archdevil."

"What, have him sit on a spined devil?"

I grinned. "Or stuff one into a cannon and tell the archdevil to turn around and bend over, yeah."

Valen stared at me. Then he laughed in a 'that's-funny-but-not-really' kind of way and scrubbed a hand over his face. "Hells. Why not? It is no worse than some of the other ideas we have come up with."

That piqued my curiosity. "What other ideas have you come up with?"

Valen's voice was sour. " _I_ did not come up with it, but Imloth thought it might be fun to summon another archdevil and have the two of them fight it out."

My blood congealed a little. "Didn't you tell him the three rules? You know, the _don't_ , _don't_ , and _don't_?"

"I did."

"And?"

Valen looked disgruntled. "And he laughed."

I bit the inside of my cheek to hide a grin. "You could try chasing him up another tree."

"Not you, too." Valen's expression was heading rapidly from disgruntled to hangdog. "It has been bad enough listening to his jokes about that day."

I coughed. "Sorry," I said, pulling a straight face. "So, Imloth thought that what this world really needed was another archdevil on the loose, and you think _I_ have bad ideas?"

"I did not say you were the only one."

"Right. Thanks. That makes me feel so much better." I tried to gather my scattered thoughts. "So. What were we talking about again?"

Valen shook his head with a sigh that was half a laugh. "I cannot even remember."

"Neither can I." I didn't want to talk about all that heavy stuff anymore, but I didn't want to stop talking, either. I was having too much fun. "So," I said then. I patted the sofa next to me in invitation. "Tell me. What other parts of Sigil are there, aside from the Hive?"

Valen looked briefly surprised, but he sat back down and answered my question readily enough. "Sigil is divided into six Wards - Lady's, Clerk's, Guildhall, Market, Lower, and the Hive."

"What's in each Ward?"

Valen shrugged. "About what you would expect, from their names." He gave me a quick sideways glance. "The, ah, Lady's Ward is the richest. Clerk's and Guildhall house the guilds and printing presses-"

I sat bolt upright. "Wait. Sigil has _printing presses_?" This world had none, that I knew of – just scriveners and engravers.

Valen's forehead furrowed, as if surprised by my surprise. "Yes, of course. Perhaps the only trade that Sigil can call its own is the trade of words and ideas. All else – food, raw materials, even water - comes in from the outside."

That made sense. The biggest of cities weren't places where things flowed _from_ – they were places where things flowed _to_ , and ideas flowed out. I frowned at him thoughtfully. "Do you have parks in Sigil? Or is it all, you know, buildings and pavement and arguments?"

"We have a few parks." There was something slightly reluctant about the way Valen said that word, as if he didn't want to admit that maybe his city wasn't overflowing with greenery. His next words all but confirmed it. "But space is at a premium in Sigil, and the lower Wards are so choked with smog that almost nothing will grow." He thought for a moment. "There are the Arched Gardens, in the Lady's Ward. Those are perhaps the most famous."

That sounded promising. "What are those like?"

"Only the size of a single building lot, but tall. They are built in layers – platforms and arches and terraces several stories high, covered in exotic plants from all over the multiverse."

I felt a twinge of envy. "Sounds beautiful."

"So I hear. I have never seen them, myself."

"Why not?"

Valen's voice took on a bitter undertone. "Because the Lady's Ward is not for the likes of me." Smoothly, he bounced the conversational ball back into my court. "What of your city? Do you have space for parks amidst all of those people?"

 _The likes of me?_ I furrowed my forehead, but didn't press the issue, since if he really wanted to explain that particular statement he probably wouldn't have changed the subject, and we were getting along for once – I didn't want to ruin it. "Um. Lots, actually." I thought back, remembering a green oasis in a concrete jungle. "I used to live right next to Central Park. That one goes on for a couple of square miles."

Valen looked shocked. "Truly?"

I felt a pleasing little surge of smugness. It looked like Sigil didn't have a monopoly on _all_ the cool stuff. "Sure. People get lost in it all the time."

Valen frowned and shrugged. "People get lost in the Arched Gardens, too, but that is because the place is lousy with portals."

I thought about that. "So when you say they get lost, you mean they accidentally end up in another world?"

"Yes."

I laughed, without humor. "Funny. That's exactly what happened to me."

Valen looked at me curiously. "Your portal was in this park of yours?"

I remembered a picture frame, standing alone in a dark grove. I hadn't thought about that place in a long, long time. "Yeah." I paused, thinking. "There are plenty of other things in the park, though. It's got fountains and ponds and trails and gardens and ampitheatres and…all kinds of things, really. It borders a few museums, too, so it usually has open-air exhibits of some kind."

Valen perked up perceptibly. "What kinds of museums?"

I blinked, startled. I had a hard time picturing Valen strolling calmly through a museum, admiring the artwork, although when I actually thought about it I didn't really see why, unless it was the 'calm' part that was giving me trouble. Also, things would only stay calm until security caught sight of him and tried to pull a weapon on him, after which there'd be blood painted on the walls, and it wouldn't be his. "Um. Art, mostly. Both modern and classical. And natural history, which was fun if you liked looking at giant lizard skeletons."

"Giant lizards?" Valen frowned thoughtfully. "Like the Behemoth, you mean?"

I blinked. "I might be able to answer that if I had any clue what the Behemoth was."

"The Behemoth is a giant lizard that sleeps in the Hive."

"How giant we talking about, here?"

"Several city blocks have been built on top of it."

"What?" I squinted at him suspiciously. "Are you pulling my leg?"

Valen looked down at my leg, then back up at my face. "Am I _what_?"

Evidently they didn't have that particular saying in Sigil. "Sorry. Earth way of asking whether you're pulling a fast one." I looked at his face. It still looked confused, and slightly pink. I tried again. "Whether you're making something up, just as a joke."

Comprehension dawned. "Oh." He chuckled. "No. No, I am not pulling your leg. The Behemoth is real. Inexplicable, but real."

"Really? So how big is this thing? And how has it not noticed people building houses on it?"

The man spread his hands in a 'hell if I know' gesture. "It has been sleeping for centuries. A single one of its breaths, from inhale to exhale, takes months. No one knows how it came to be there, or even remembers a time when it was not there."

"So you built houses on it?"

Valen snorted. "This is Sigil, the city with the highest real estate prices in the known multiverse. Of course we built houses on it."

"Right," I said drily. It was strange, how natural it felt to sit and talk like this, as if we weren't from different worlds and hadn't been at each other's throats not that long ago. "Giant sleeping lizard who mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and might wake up any day now and eat half the city? That's prime real estate right there. How did that not occur to me?"

Valen laughed softly. "Because you are not a Cager."

"Because I'm not a crazy person, more like."

"Sigil has those, too, and aplenty."

"So do we." I affected a bored tone. "On every street corner." I smirked at him, taunting. "C'mon, Cager. You're gonna have to try harder than that if you want to win this one."

Valen's eyes narrowed, the same way they did when he was looking for an opening when we sparred. "I am willing to wager that your city does not have Xaositects."

I frowned. "Wager won. What the hell are those?"

It was Valen's turn to smirk. "Xaositects believe that the nature of the multiverse is that of fundamentally incomprehensible chaos, so the only way to deal with it is to embrace insanity."

I laughed. "That sounds familiar."

Valen gave me a weird look. "How so?"

"It's how I feel every time I hear Deekin sing."

Another one of those startled laughs left Valen's throat, as if he couldn't quite believe he was laughing even as he was doing it. "True. If I did not know better, I might take him for a Xaositect."

"Maybe he is. Do they exist outside of Sigil?"

"Not to my knowledge, and I have met quite a few, or at least listened to the deranged ranting of quite a few."

"Were there a lot of them in the Hive?"

Valen sighed. "More than anywhere else. The lawlessness of the Hive suits them. They had their headquarters there, where they liked to foment chaos by plaguing hardened criminals."

I smiled. "Like yourself?"

Valen didn't smile. "I was a criminal out of necessity, not choice, and a petty one at that."

I backpedaled. "I know. I'm just teasing."

"Do not." The tiefling's voice had gained a tight edge. "You say you come from wealth and privilege. Very well. I do not expect you to understand what it is like to grow up in a place like the Hive, but I do expect you not to make light of it."

 _Wow._ I stared at his face, suddenly closed-off and unsmiling. It was as if, with his apology and my confession, we'd finally stopped fighting and started dancing instead, only now I'd just stomped on his toes. "It bothers you that much?"

His voice was flat. "Yes."

I flushed and looked down, picking at the cuff of my shirt. _Me and my big mouth._ In hindsight, maybe it wasn't all that nice to crack jokes about the slums to somebody who grew up in one. "All right. I'm sorry. I'll stop."

"Good. Thank you." Valen took a deep breath. Then, as if he hadn't just called me onto the carpet, he went on. "Xaositects hate organized knowledge above all – anything that tries to make sense of reality. The only people in Sigil more beleaguered by them than Hivers are the scribes at the Scriptorium."

His abrupt change of subject sounded like a peace offering. I took it with both hands. I didn't want us to start butting heads again – if nothing else, he was a lot better equipped for the exercise than I was. "The Scriptorium? Is that some kind of a library?"

Valen nodded. "Yes. It is the largest in the city - an entire block of buildings, with several sub-levels containing miles of shelving."

I came to my hometown's defense. "Really? Ours is four stories high, and has about seventy miles of bookshelves."

"Ah, but does it have books in every known language in the multiverse?" Valen looked at my expression. An inkling of his former smile was coming back. "I thought not. You are not winning this one…" He trailed off uncertainly. "What do you call someone from your city, anyway?

I replied at once, deadpan. "Stressed out and bad-tempered."

Valen chuckled. "That _does_ sound very much like Sigil." He gave me a sidelong glance, his voice going a little tentative. "I…think I might like to see your city, someday. It sounds like it is not so unlike mine, in some ways."

Deliberately, I avoided looking at his horns. I decided not to tell him that he'd probably start a panic if he showed up anywhere in my old world. The news would just burst his bubble, and it wasn't like there was any chance it would become an issue, anyway. My home was far away, I had no plans to return, and Valen would probably stay here as long as the Seer did, so there was no point in warning him off of something he'd never do anyway. "Sigil sounds pretty amazing, too," I said, dodging a little. Then, since we were having pipe dreams anyway, I added, "Maybe I could visit someday." A sudden uncomfortable silence made me look at Valen more closely. I frowned in irritation. "What? Why did you just get that look on your face?"

Valen hesitated. "Perhaps someday." He spoke slowly, as if he was picking his way through a verbal thicket, where there were burrs and thorns and bear traps and other things he didn't really want to stumble into. "After some very long lessons on what not to do." He winced. "Or say."

My bubble burst with a near-audible splat. "Is Sigil really that dangerous?

Valen's voice was flat. "Yes."

Now I really wanted to go, if only to wipe that horrified expression off of his face. I persisted. "Worse than the Underdark?"

Valen's voice was about as encouraging as a hangman's. "In some ways, yes, if only because the danger is harder to spot." He gestured around us. "Here, it is clearly unwise to trust anyone but the rebels. In Sigil, few things are ever so clear-cut. A Prime like you, who knows little of the Planes…" He trailed off, seeming at a loss for words.

That look on his face really wasn't reassuring. It combined a splash of horror with a dollop of restrained hilarity and a pinch of _oh-god-please-no_. "You called me formidable," I pointed out.

"You are," Valen answered hastily. "But formidable is not enough. You must also be canny to the ways of the Cage, and you, with all due respect, are not."

I mulled that over, biting my lower lip. He had a point. I'd already walked into a new world once without knowing what I was getting into. Twice, if you counted the Underdark. If I ever did it again, maybe I should try going prepared this time. It would probably lengthen my lifespan considerably. "Okay, fine," I said. "Then teach me."

Valen's jaw dropped. " _Teach_ you?"

I glowered at him. He didn't have to sound _that_ aghast. "Yes," I said haughtily. "Teach me. About Sigil."

It took him a few tries to get words out. "That…will take a great deal of time."

My smile was as serene and unperturbed as a mountain lake. "Then you'd better start talking, hadn't you?"

Valen gave me a long look. His face was stern, but his voice had a gently chiding edge to it. "You are giving commands again, _my lady_."

I flushed and tried to chase the Blumenthal out of my voice. "All right," I conceded. Then I folded my hands on my lap, sat up straight, and put on my most winning smile. " _Please_ tell me about Sigil?"

Slowly, Valen's face eased into an answering smile. "If you insist, Rebecca."

* * *

It was later, and I was confused. "Wait. What the hell's a baurier?"

Valen sighed and explained, not-so-patiently. "A bariaur is like a centaur, only with the body and horns of a ram, not a horse."

I brightened. I had actually understood that. Even my old world knew about centaurs, although here they were real and there they were just a myth. "All right. You said this guy bleated like a goat at one. What happened to him?"

"He committed suicide."

I didn't see the connection. "Why? How?"

"The bariaur gored him to death."

My forehead wrinkled. "I thought you said he committed suicide."

Valen's voice was dry. "Bleating at a bariaur _is_ suicide."

The penny dropped. I laughed. "Oh. I see your point. All right. Note to self. Don't make barnyard noises at bariaurs." I grinned at him teasingly. "I guess this means no clucking at devas, either, huh?"

Valen actually cringed. "Please do not do that, Rebecca."

My little sally had obviously fallen flatter than a skewered soufflé. "Relax. I was only joking."

"Right." His voice was flat. "Do me a favor-"

"What?"

"Just assume that no one in Sigil has a sense of humor."

"Why?"

"Because you will live longer that way."

I hmph'ed. "Fine. So, what about-"

The door to the library creaked open, cutting me off in mid-sentence. Imloth stood framed in the doorway. He looked at us curiously, giving me a bow and Valen an amused smile. "There you are, _abbil_. We thought we had misplaced you, until we asked the Seer and she told us you had in fact been stolen," he greeted the tiefling, his eyes dancing. He turned to me, still wearing that amused smile. "You are a better thief than you seem, priestess, if you can make away with a prize as large and as hard to conceal as our General."

I flushed. "I didn't steal him," I protested. "He's been right here the whole time." The drow was wearing something skintight in red silk. The shirt had lots of strategically-placed slashes, so that he looked like he'd been mauled by a very tasteful tiger with great appreciation for the male form. I stared. "Uh. Nice outfit."

Momentarily diverted, Imloth grinned and executed a coquettish spin. Nested silver chains, set with garnets, dangled from his throat to his navel, brushing against a washboard stomach. "Do you like it?"

I looked at him appraisingly. The man looked like he was ready to go clubbing. He'd even put his face on – his eyelashes had gotten longer and been tipped with sparkling silver, his eyes were winged with silver-and-red eyeshadow, and his cheekbones had taken on contours that weren't there before. "What's not to like?"

Imloth looked down at himself. "Nothing?" he said, as if surprised I'd even had to ask.

At the door, another figure followed Imloth – Nathyrra, slinking over the threshold, frowning. She'd swapped her usual dark, utilitarian leathers for a form-fitting, purple leather catsuit that had a high, snug neck, long sleeves, and matching gloves. The effect was more cat burglar than party girl, but it was definitely striking. A cluster of raw amethysts sparkled at her ears, her lips had taken on a purplish sheen, and her eyes seemed even bigger and darker than usual. "Is all well?" she asked Valen. "Ossyr has been looking for you."

Imloth nodded. "Yes," he added. "That is what I meant to tell you, only I forgot. He is waiting in the Seer's quarters, and she is giving him tea to make him stop screaming. He says you were to tell him what orders to give the golems on the outer wall, and also to tell him how to make them not argue about the orders after he gives them."

Valen sprang from seated to vertical as if he'd just been stung by a bee. "Ossyr!" he exclaimed, and catapulted for the door. "Hellfire! I forgot all about him."

Imloth turned and watched the weapon master's progress, his face bemused. "You forgot?" the drow asked. "How? He is very loud and very not small."

Valen reached the door and whirled. "I…lost track of time," he muttered, his face flushing. His eyes went to me. "Rebecca. I am sorry. Duty calls. I need to go tell Ossyr…something."

I looked back, bemused. "Something?"

"Yes." The tiefling hung by the door, visibly discontented. "I have no idea what, but hopefully I can figure it out between here and the Seer's quarters."

My lips twitched. "That's a short trip."

Valen shrugged. "I will think fast," he said. He hesitated. "I shall…speak with you later?"

I smiled. "Sure." Valen nodded and turned to go. On an impulse, I stepped forward, my hand out to stop him. "Actually, wait."

Valen paused, a frown of inquiry on his face. "Yes?"

I closed the gap to him. "I never answered your question," I said. My stomach danced the jitterbug, but fair was fair, so I put my hand on his shoulder, leaned in, and whispered two words in his pointed ear.

Valen went still, his lips parted a little in surprise as the words seemed to sink in. "That is what your city is called?" he asked softly. At my wordless nod, he flashed me a smile like a solar flare, brief but blinding. "A good name. I like it." Then, with a deep bow, he turned and ducked out of the door.

I watched the door close, feeling like I'd just stepped out of a gyroscope – off-balance, off-kilter, and with my head all awhirl. "That was…abrupt," I said weakly.

Imloth looked after his vanished General. "It is his way," he said, shrugging. He glanced at me, frowning thoughtfully. "Though it is not his way to forget these things. Small things, like names, yes. Large things, like sergeants, no."

The door banged inwards, rebounded off the wall, and came to a stop against an outstretched palm, making us all jump. Valen stood there, frowning at us as if wondering what the hell we were all still doing there. Then he shifted his frown to Nathyrra. "Nathyrra," he said briskly. "You know how to speak to these golems."

Nathyrra turned, the dread of an underling called on to do something she didn't want to do written in every line of her. "I suppose…"

"Good." Valen vanished again. His voice shot back over the threshold. "You can tell Ossyr how to deal with them. Come with me."

Nathyrra swallowed and looked straight ahead, like she was marching to her execution. "Yes, General." She followed Valen out of the door.

Silence fell. It felt strange. _I_ felt strange – floaty, almost, with a heart that beat too fast and a head that felt like I'd poured my brains out onto the floor and filled my skull with bubbles, instead. Stranger still, the black mood that had been plaguing me was gone in its entirety. Was this what honesty felt like? If so, I needed to come up with a few more secrets, just so I could unburden myself of them. This was better than any drug.

A throat cleared. I turned to see Imloth watching me with a faint, quizzical smile on his face. I frowned. "What?"

The drow's smile vanished. He shook his head. "Only thinking. It is a dangerous exercise for a male, I know, but sometimes I cannot help myself." He crossed to me, moving like he was a step away from dancing, and announced, "We must do something about your hair." Before I could react, he reached out and lifted a dark curl in his fingertips. He surveyed it critically before letting it fall. "And your clothes." He looked down pointedly. "You are not wearing that, are you?"

I looked down, too. "Uh. Apparently not?"

Imloth nodded. "Good." He turned, beckoning. "Come! You go among drow to represent the Seer. Drow prize beauty. We must make you as beautiful as a drow, or else they will not respect you, and thus will not respect us."

I grinned at him. I couldn't seem to help myself. It felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from my chest. "Fine," I said, strolling after him. "Mission impossible it is."


	37. War Paint

_A/N: Rebecca's outfit was partially inspired by a couple of different dresses from Zuhair Murad's spring 2012 and 2013 collections - I can't link it because ffnet, but do a google image search for 'zuhair murad spring gold dress' and they'll be in the first couple of rows of results. ;)_

* * *

 _Truth casts a shadow hard to conceal_

 _But darkness blurs the flaws the light reveals  
_ _Charm is deceitful and flattery is vain  
_ _But in the dark of the hunt the veil remains_

 _Oh, what tangled webs that we weave  
_ _When at first we practice to deceive  
_ _We become a slave to make believing_

\- Dirt Poor Robins, "Masquerade"

~*~  
Chapter 37: War Paint  
~*~

Imloth took me to my chambers and sat me in a chair. Then he tilted my head up with a perfunctory finger under my chin and turned my face back and forth, his pale eyes thoughtful. "Hmm. This will be challenging."

The gesture was so familiar and yet so strange that I felt like I'd been dunked into a tank of cold water – shocked still and stunned. Instinctively, I lapsed into a doll-like passivity, letting myself get primped and prodded. That was familiar and strange, too. I was in the wrong place. I was with the wrong people. I was in the wrong _world_. Why did I suddenly feel like I was prepping for a presser? "H-how so?"

Imloth tilted my face up, inspecting its every line with a critical eye. "Your colors are so different from ours. If drow are night, you are day. And your hair…" He lifted my hair with both hands, looping the curls over his hands and rubbing them between his fingers and then piling it all on top of my head, all with the same pensive air of an artist contemplating his palette. "It is dark, but it has day colors in it, too. Very strange." Then a broad, brilliant smile spread across his face. "A-ha! Yes. I see how to do this." He laughed, a merry sound of pure delight. "You will strike them all blind, priestess."

That feeling of bewildering familiarity grew. Something was wrong, though. My hand felt empty. It took a few seconds for me to figure out what should be in it. "Right. So, where's my champagne?"

Imloth did something to my hair that made a single curl tumble down the side of my face. He studied the result and nodded to himself in satisfaction. "Sorry? What is that?" he asked absently.

"Champagne," I repeated. Obediently, I turned my head in response to the pressure of Imloth's fingers on my chin. "It's a kind of wine. With bubbles in it. I always used to have a glass whenever I did this." I'd step up onto a fitting platform or sit in a makeup chair and hold my hand out and some random assistant would put a champagne flute in it. It had been automatic. All anyone had to do was gush, "You look _fabulous_ , darling," and my hand would shoot out in some kind of alcoholic Pavlovian response.

Imloth paused, drew back a little, and looked at me speculatively. Then he grinned and took me by the hands and drew me up and steered me towards the bathtub. "I will find what we need. You will wash now," he ordered. "I will return later."

He swept out. I stared after him. Then I looked at Enserric. "Why do I get the feeling that saying 'no' isn't an option?" I complained to my sword.

A faint red glow kindled. "If you try to stop this, I shall scream bloody murder, and I do not care who hears me," Enserric answered, as unsympathetic as a punch in the nose. "It is about time someone nipped those slovenly inclinations of yours in the bud."

Come to think of it, it _had_ been a pretty stupid idea to ask a deadly weapon for sympathy. "Right," I said glumly. "Drow makeover it is." _And may Shaundakul grant me patience, because I'm gonna need it._ Then I propped Enserric against the wall, still in his scabbard, and followed the instructions I'd been given.

I was lathering my hair when Nathyrra breezed into my bathroom unannounced. "Oh, good," she said, taking in the scene with a glance. She was carrying a tray full of little pots and jars. Without waiting for an invite, she swept over, put the tray down at the tub's edge, and handed me a jar. "Here. Use this. It will make your hair look better."

The woman may have had a flair for politics, but she had a shaky grasp of diplomacy. "How did your talk go?" I asked, forcing my voice to stay mild. Obediently, I uncorked the jar she'd given me. It was full of something creamy and sweet-smelling. I scooped some of the goop out and began working it through my hair. "Did Ossyr stop shouting?"

Nathyrra shrugged. "Eventually."

Was I going to have to drag it out of her? "So, where'd you leave Valen?" I asked. "Is he coming along?" A horrible thought occurred to me. "Don't tell me you left him to talk to the golems alone." We kind of needed those golems, and we might not have any left if Valen had to stand there and listen to them yammer for any length of time.

Nathyrra settled cross-legged at the edge of the tub, frowning. "No. General Valen is taking care of other business. I asked if he wished to join us, but he said that he had duties to attend to and did not wish to leave the Seer unguarded." Pensively, she drummed her nails against the marble tile. They were amazingly pearly and well-kept. "A shame. His presence would send a strong message."

I thought of how tense Valen had been in the city, surrounded on all sides by potential enemies. "I…don't think he'd have much fun there, anyway." It was probably better this way, but it would have been interesting to hear Valen's perspective on Lith My'athar, given that he came from a city that probably blew it out of the water. We could even compare notes. People-watch. Make fun of the locals. That kind of thing.

Nathyrra gave me an opaque stare. "This is not a matter of fun," she said. "It is a matter of…of…" She paused, seeming to hunt for the right word.

A short-lived career in politics and a lifetime in the public eye came to my rescue. "Optics?" I supplied.

The drow woman tilted her head, then nodded decisively. "Yes. Optics. Exactly. You will be seen. We must take care that you are seen as we wish you to be seen – not only for your own benefit, but for ours." She looked at me and reached for another one of her little jars. "Tilt your head back. This should improve your face."

If she didn't stop implying that my face needed improving, I was going to improve _her_ face. With my fist. Only I wasn't, because I'd be down a very useful ally if I did, so what I was actually going to do was put up and shut up. Disgruntled, I tilted my head back. Nathyrra uncapped the jar and started rubbing something into my skin. It felt cool and heavy, like a clay mask. _I get teleported into the Underdark, sucked into a war, and almost killed half a dozen times,_ I thought. _And now? Suddenly, it's spa day._

Nathyrra stopped decorating me with mud pies and gave me an odd look. "Why are you laughing?"

A chuckle shook my shoulders. "I can't decide."

"What can you not decide?"

"Whether my life's a tragedy or a comedy."

Nathyrra cocked her head. "Both, I think, as with anyone else's," she murmured. She went back to smearing goo on my face. "Unless we are speaking of my life," she added darkly. "In which case, it is a farce."

"What kind of a farce?" I asked, still laughing. "One of those ones where everybody gets caught in compromising positions, or the ones where everybody dies?"

Nathyrra's laughter rose to join mine. She had a nice laugh, as light and musical as the chiming of a bell. "I think it might be both."

"So it's a tragic comedy where all the players die in compromising positions?"

Nathyrra laughed again. "Do you know, I believe you have just described the entirety of drow society in one sentence?"

We were still laughing when Imloth got back. He stopped and stared at us quizzically. "Oh, dear."

I grinned at him. The knowledge that I probably looked like a jack o'lantern that had fallen into an ooze puddle sent me into another spate of laughter. "Why so worried?" I asked.

Imloth's voice was dry. "When females laugh together, a wise male worries." With a flourish, he pulled a bottle out from underneath a pile of very shiny gold fabric. "But I have good news! I have found what you sought." Another brief rummage produced three glasses. Imloth uncorked and poured something blue and fizzy. Cautiously, he sniffed at it. "At least, I think I have."

I was sitting in a bathtub in the company of two drow. This was probably somebody's dream come true. It wasn't mine, especially since neither of the drow in question seemed to notice nor care that I had no clothes on. But what the hell – if you counted the pictures that'd been leaked to the gossip mags over the years, about a million people had already seen me naked, and if you counted that one video, about a million more had seen me getting banged like a drum. I didn't see what difference two more people made. "You're a peach, Imloth," I drawled, and held out my empty hand. Bubbles plopped from my elbow to the water. "Thank you."

A glass was obligingly placed in my hand, and now, finally, I felt at home. "I am sorry," Imloth said politely. "What is a peach?"

I looked at the wine, or whatever it was. It was the color of sapphires. I sipped it. It was earthy and sweet, with notes of things I'd never tasted in a wine before, like radishes and beets and wild mushrooms, with a lingering peppery finish and a slight fizz. It was bizarre, but intriguing. I took another sip and sighed in pleasure. "Something very sweet and very nice, Imloth.."

Imloth beamed. "And they say humans are uncivil."

I was starting to suspect that backhanded compliments were something of a drow specialty. "We try," I murmured, and raised my glass to him before taking another sip.

After a last scrub and a final rinse, Imloth and Nathyrra fished me out of the tub and dried me off, then handed me another glass of wine and left me to stand in my skivvies while they plotted.

Nathyrra wandered over to the dressing table and inspected Imloth's haul, her eyebrows lifting. "Where did you get this?"

Imloth shrugged. "I asked Quarra."

"Did you tell her what it was for?"

Imloth snorted elegantly. "Of course not. Then she might not have given it to me."

Nathyrra arched an eyebrow. "Prudent."

Imloth bowed to her in acknowledgement of her compliment. Then he turned to look me up and down. "Hmm. Yes. It is as I thought."

I returned the drow's gaze benignly, my glass held in an upraised hand and my elbow cupped in my opposite hand. "What's as you thought?"

Imloth approached and touched my shoulders with his fingertips. "You are very tall, very, hmm, elegant, which is good, but here," he said, and waved a hand in front of my chest. "There is nothing happening." He gestured towards my hips and waist. "And here, too." He eyed me critically, more like he was looking at a blank canvas than my body. "We must fix it."

I considered that. Then I shrugged and spread my arms wide. My drow compatriots here seemed to be on a mission, and it'd cost me less grief to go along than to argue. Besides, I was kind of curious to see what they'd come up with. "Fine. Do your worst."

Imloth cocked his head, perplexed. "Why not do my best?"

Nathyrra brightened. "Oh! I know this." She turned to Imloth. "It is a figure of speech."

Imloth's face got even more confused. "A figure of what?"

I listened and drank my wine and wondered if it was too late to back out. If I hadn't let myself get talked into this, even now I could be on a nice comfy sofa, hearing the lowdown on Sigil. Instead, I was contemplating a goddamn PR stunt in front of an audience known for fatally expressing their disapproval. No – I was conceding enough. Becoming a language tutor was a step too far. I'd just enjoy my wine, and the drow could sort this one out on their lonesome.

In short order, the two drow decided that surfacers sometimes made very little sense, Imloth's worst should, in fact, be his best, and they set to work.

Nathyrra inspected Imloth's box of goodies. A stream of quick, incomprehensible syllables rushed past me, and eventually, a brush and a pot of some gold powder with a faint quartz shimmer was produced. Nathyrra primped and powdered me and did her best to conceal my scars.

Imloth produced a set of leggings. "Wear this," he ordered.

I took the leggings. They were suede, and so black they reminded me of Silent Partner, a thought which had me fighting back a sudden upswelling of grief. Resolutely, I put my grief and my wine glass aside and squirmed into the leggings. They fit, barely. I decided not to ask who they'd belonged to, just in case they'd belonged to a man and I spent the rest of the evening sobbing into my wine.

The next thing Imloth pulled out of his bag of tricks was a long swath of what looked like pleated gold lamé. "Because nothing made for a drow will fit you properly, we must make something," he announced. "Luckily, you are easy to dress, because you are shaped like a, uh..." He trailed off with an annoyed 'tsk'. "You know, the ones that are long and flat, with the sharp edges."

"A rectangle?" Nathyrra suggested.

Imloth snapped his fingers. "Yes. That."

I stared over his head, my expression distant. _And I thought elves were supposed to be polite._ Maybe this was how drow were behind closed doors, or maybe this artless chutzpah was unique to the ones who followed Eilistraee. _Or maybe I'm just a magnet for people who don't have filters._ I went through a mental list of my friends and took a gulp of wine _. Right. No filters it is._

Once his mind was made up on what to do, Imloth worked with a kind of brisk professionalism. The swath of fabric he'd chosen to work with was long and narrow, maybe a foot wide. With a couple of deft twists, he looped it around my neck to form a halter. Then he began to weave, criss-crossing the ends over my breasts to form an 'X' and then sweeping around my back and towards the front again until an elaborately interwoven bodice began to take shape. The bodice ended at my hips, tapering slightly down and inwards towards the apex of my thighs. A clever tuck here and tug there arrayed the trailing ends of the fabric until the whole thing fell not so much like a skirt but like a really long loincloth, leaving both legs exposed all the way to the hip.

Nathyrra towel-dried my hair, then did things that involved a lot of lifting and tugging and frequent resorting to her collection of jars. It wasn't clear who was winning that fight, but my money was on my hair.

Once my hair was tamed, or at least temporarily stunned, Imloth opened his velvet box and pinned a pair of long gold tassels to my earlobes. The earrings brushed the tops of my shoulders, the thin golden chains all whisker-soft. While I turned my head this way and that, getting used to the weight of earrings again, Nathyrra clasped a hammered gold cuff around each of my wrists, heavy and cold.

Imloth did something to my lips. I touched the tip of my tongue to my upper lip, and tasted the familiar waxy flavor of rouge.

Nathyrra did my eyes. A fine brush, dipped in kohl, lined my eyelids. A few strokes of the same brush lengthened my lashes. Finding creams that would match my complexion was harder, but pots in shades of yellow and white and red were carefully mixed and dabbed onto my face until my stylists found a mix they liked and painted me like a billboard.

Shoes were trickier. Not many drow had feet my size, but Nathyrra left for a while and came back with a pair of high-heeled ankle boots in some kind of inky black lizard-skin. They pinched a little and made me tower over both elves like a beanstalk over strawberry vines, but I kept my mouth shut and told myself it was just for one night and did as I was told.

When they were done, Imloth looked at me and smiled and drew me to the mirror. I looked at my reflection and saw a familiar stranger.

The getup Imloth had devised for me was something else, I'd give him that. The pleating and mantle-like drape of it had a priestly sort of vibe, but there was also a glamour and sensuality to it that said _this_ priestess might enjoy spending her nights on her knees, and not necessarily in front of an altar. The pleating and criss-crossing didn't make me look curvy, because nothing short of a professional illusionist could do that, but it did take my figure from 'boyish' to 'definitely a chick'. As for my legs, well, I came by those honestly, and Imloth had shrewdly made my gams the stars of the show. Even I couldn't see where they ended, and I was attached to the damn things.

Imloth stepped back, admiring his handiwork. "I have brought sunlight to the Underdark," he effused.

Nathyrra studied me critically. "It will do," she said. Then, as if she'd realized that she wasn't being very encouraging, she added, "It is a great improvement. You look almost dignified now."

By all accounts, I wasn't bad to look at, but elves had this knack for making me feel like I was. Also, Nathyrra really needed to up her compliment game. "Thanks," I said drily, and studied my reflection a little more. The woman in the mirror was red-lipped and smoky-eyed and statuesque, with her normally feral mop of hair tamed and braided into a crown around her head. She wasn't me, but at the same time, she _was_ me, just a version of me I hadn't seen in a long time, and I didn't know how to feel about that.

Nathyrra stepped to my side, meeting my reflection's eyes. "Are you well?" she asked.

My reflection and I stared at each other like a pair of stray cats across a chain link fence. "Fine," I lied. Then I thought about how honesty felt, and said, "I just….I never thought I'd see her again."

Nathyrra's expression turned briefly startled, then softened in sympathy. "She will never leave you," she said, reaching up and clasping my shoulder for just a moment. "I know. I have tried to rid myself of Nathyrra of House Kant'tar, to be only Nathyrra, but the Fourth Daughter of Kant'tar still returns to me, sometimes."

I nodded wordlessly, still staring into the mirror. _How far do I have to run to get away from you?_ I asked my reflection. She didn't answer, the woman in the mirror. She never did. She was kind of a bitch that way.

With a firm _plink_ , I set my wine glass down on the dressing table and turned away from my reflection. _Enough._ This brooding wasn't getting me anywhere. "So, if I'm sunlight, what are you two?" I asked my drow allies.

Imloth and Nathyrra exchanged glances. Imloth spoke first, brushing a fingertip lightly over one of his glittering cheekbones. "I am silver, in honor of the Dark Maiden, our lady Eilistraee," he said. His finger touched one corner of his eye, where scarlet joined the silver. His voice turned solemn. "And I am red, because the Dark Maiden yearns for peace but does not fear to shed blood in defense of her people."

Nathyrra studied him sideways, then looked at me. "Red and blue are…" She paused, and took a deep breath before continuing. " _Were_ the colors of House Kant'tar." With a delicate sweep of her hand, she gestured at her purple leather. "I am a houseless rogue, and to wear the colors of a fallen House openly would be to insult the House which now offers me refuge." Her smile was proud. "But to wear them combined, and thus hidden in plain sight, cannot be faulted – and serves as a reminder."

I frowned. "A reminder of what?"

Nathyrra's smile widened. "Of the Valsharess's failure. She sought to end the line of Kant'tar. She could not." The drow tossed her head, a defiant spark lighting her eyes. "Those who think to ally with her against the Seer would do well to remember that."

I looked back and forth between the two of them, resisting the urge to touch my own face. This stuff on our faces wasn't makeup. It was war paint, and our clothes were battle garb.

Once again, I looked in the mirror, and this time the woman in the mirror looked a little different. On second glance, I could see her scars underneath her makeup, and the wiry, tensile strength in her limbs, and if she was regal, it wasn't the kind of regal that sat in a palace - it was more like the kind of regal that stood at the head of an army.

Enserric's strident voice cut right through his scabbard and across the room. "Well, _finally_." He sounded primly pleased. "Now you look like a proper wielder for a weapon of my caliber."

I rolled my eyes. "Nice to know I can always trust you to make it all about you, Enserric."

I took one last look at the stranger in the mirror, then looked away, shaking my head. _Idiocy_ , I thought. _It's just fancy clothes, is all – and I should probably cut back on the wine._ I crossed the room, grabbing Enserric - sword, scabbard and all. "Come with me," I told the drow, and barged out of the door without looking backwards, my heels clicking on the marble floors.

Deekin answered his door at the first knock, and I thrust my sword at him. "Here. Watch him for me." I paused, and an echo of a silk-smoke voice came to me, softly chiding, ' _You are giving commands again, my lady_ '. I cleared my throat. "Please?"

The little bard took the sword, meeting my eyes in mute understanding. "You gots it, Boss," he said solemnly. Then he squinted and shaded his eyes with one hand. "Wow. Uh. You supposed to be that shiny, Boss?"

I shrugged. "That's cutting edge fashion for you. If people's eyes aren't bleeding, you're not doing it right."

Red light seeped through the seam of Enserric's scabbard. "I could not agree more."

I sighed. "You would," I grumbled. I tapped the sword's pommel with my fingernail. "Speaking of which, don't kill anybody while I'm gone."

"Very well, my wielder." The sword pulsed. "And…good luck. Do not kill anyone without me."

"I'll try not to," I said drily, and turned away, hiding my nervousness. If the Valsharess stole this weapon, too, I'd be even further up the creek than I already was. Taking a deep breath, I touched my holy symbol for reassurance. I wasn't alone. Whatever else I was, I wasn't that. Calming, I nodded to Nathyrra and Imloth, who stood waiting. "So," I said then. "Did I hear somebody say something about a party?"


	38. The Beautiful People

_A/N: Party time! This chapter earns its M rating for adult themes. Nothing really explicit (not on FFnet, anyway), but you can't walk into a drow party and expect not to see some shenanigans. You've been warned._

 _Also, was this song practically written for the drow, or is it just me?_

* * *

 _And I don't want you and I don't need you  
_ _Don't bother to resist, or I'll beat you  
_ _It's not your fault that you're always wrong  
_ _The weak ones are there to justify the strong_

 _The beautiful people  
_ _The beautiful people_

\- Marilyn Manson, "The Beautiful People"

 _"_ _Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."_

\- Pericles

~*~  
Chapter 38: The Beautiful People  
~*~

I crossed the threshold between the city street and the tavern's entryway, and plunged from the quiet dark into a sea of light and sound and heat.

Mage lights in every color of the rainbow lit the tavern's massive central room. The lights were soft, no brighter than candlelight, but there were dozens of them, and they cast languid, rippling color over every surface, making it look almost as if we were floating deep in some kaleidoscope sea.

Footsteps echoed on marble and whispered on thick carpets. Music rose from strings and drums, discordant, wild, throbbing. Drinks clinked. Voices murmured, whispered, laughed, moaned, and sometimes screamed. As silent as the streets of the city had been, here, there was noise, noise enough to make up for the silence and then some.

I inhaled. The air smelled like perfume, smoke, and sex. The scent of it snaked right down into the base of my spine, making my nostrils flare and my hips shift restlessly. It had been a long time. Too long, since I'd been in a place like this one.

And then there were the drow – the people of the place. They were everywhere, each one as exquisite as a song. They lounged on luxuriant furniture, crowded around tables, leaned on the balconies overlooking the hall, and danced wherever there was space. Servers carrying trays full of food and drink slipped lithely through the crowd. Everyone down to the help was beautifully dressed, though seldom heavily. Pound per pound, I was pretty sure there was more jewelry in here than actual clothing, and I'd seldom seen this much eyeliner all in one place.

A drow male, dressed in tight black silk that almost forced the eye to roam and wonder where fabric ended and skin began, greeted us at the door with a bow and a stream of meaningless sound that I took to be the usual empty courtesies. Or rather, he greeted Nathyrra, who stalked forward without deigning to acknowledge him, radiating chilly arrogance. Me, he ignored, like I didn't even exist.

I took my cue from Nathyrra, drew hauteur around me like a cloak, and walked at her side. _Don't follow, they'll think she's the leader,_ some faded instinct cautioned, so I kept pace, falling into a strut I half-remembered from countless runway galas. Imloth trailed a couple of steps behind both of us – respectful, discreet, meek.

We advanced. Deliberately, I kept my pace slow. If this was anything like walking into some social scene back home, any minute now people would notice the newcomers, and then…

…a ripple seemed to run through the crowd, heads began to turn, a temporary hush fell, and I thought, _Yep. Right on cue,_ and kept walking without breaking my stride, my haughty mask tighter than Imloth's pants.

After a few moments, the buzz of conversation resumed, although there were still plenty of eyes on us – on _me_. Some were speculative, some amused, some disdainful, and some just plain inscrutable.

I tried really, really hard not to think about the fact that I was walking bare-backed through a crowd of drow, practically daring them to stab me right between the shoulder blades. I hoped Imloth stuck close behind me – like, piggyback-ride close.

We passed a cluster of high-backed wing chairs facing a hearth where smokeless purple fire danced. There was a woman seated at the edge of the ring of firelight, her face shadowed. She wore a sleek, jade-colored silk robe beneath an ornate golden mantle. The mantle was tapered to a point, stiff-shouldered, and richly embroidered. There was a parrot perched on her shoulder, one of those big yellow and turquoise ones, looking as out of place as…well, as out of place as a parrot in the Underdark. It chuckled and muttered to its owner, and she stroked its feathers absently, staring into the fire.

A woman brushed past me, not quite touching. This one had a spider on her shoulder, not a parrot. She stroked one of its legs, the fine bristles bending beneath her hand, and she whispered something to it, seemingly ignoring us, but I saw the glitter of her red eyes as we brushed past her, close enough to smell her perfume, all bitter almond and cedar and roses.

Laughter rose from the bar. It came from a cluster of men and women who were dressed all in snow white and emerald green, cut in stark, smooth lines. They looked like fashion plates, and vaguely familiar. My recollection filled in the blanks. _My'afin._ These were the butterflies I'd seen before on the city streets, vain and flitting.

A commotion near the bar drew my attention away from House My'afin's popinjays and to a pair of drow women, each of them in dark purple and turquoise dresses that weren't so much clothes as artfully-draped strips of velvet, made to look like spiderwebs. The two women shot us glares of naked fury and disdain and shoved their way through the crowd, towards the door and away from us. A ripple followed them, voices raising and heads turning.

Nathyrra's head turned slightly, as if she was keeping tabs on them. "Olath," she murmured, her lips barely moving. "Be wary. They are powerless without Lolth, but hate has a power all its own, especially in those with little left to lose."

I tried to watch the purple-and-turquoise ladies from the corner of my eye, too, without much success. Olath, I remembered, was a House of religious fanatics, clerics of Lolth down to the last woman. They despised the Seer and her people as heretics, and the only saving grace was that, with Lolth gone, there wasn't much they could do about it. _Hopefully._

We moved on, skirting around a writhing knot of dancers. Two drow women whirled past, their hands moving over each other as much as their feet moved over the floor. Another woman twirled by, her arms upraised, laughing – not so much in joy but in pleasure, and as I watched she grabbed a man by both hands and swung him onto the floor, not waiting for his assent.

Bodies writhed in alcoves, and sometimes even outside of them. My eyes fell on a woman who was perched on the edge of her chair, her dress pushed up high and a man kneeling in front of her with her ankles locked behind his head and her fingers tangled in his hair and…

 _Whoa, Nellie!_ I looked away, fighting back a laugh. This was obviously an 'anything goes and everyone comes' kind of place. That was fine. It wouldn't be the first time I'd been to this kind of party, although the sounds that woman was making were making me painfully aware that it had been a long time since I'd been in anything like her position.

I looked away from the spectacle, gritting my teeth. _You and me,_ I told my right hand. _Tonight. It's a date. Be there with bells on, or I swear to god, my head's going to explode and you'll be sorry because you'll be attached to a body without a head._ Then I drew in a deep, bracing breath and kept moving forward.

We passed a drow woman in a red dress with lots of little layers, like feathers, who sat on a backless settee. She wore a slim gold diadem in her bone-white hair, and a half-mask of crimson feathers. Two men were kneeling at her feet. They wore red, like her, but skintight, with high necks like collars. As I passed, she reached out and drew one of the men up to her for a kiss. He came along obediently, and the kiss went on until the woman released him. She seemed to think for a moment. Then she drew her arm back and slapped him – not a little slap, but a full-armed, open-palmed swing that connected with his jaw hard enough to knock him to the floor. Once he was down, she placed a foot on his back, pushing his face into the ground. He held still, not even trying to resist, a gesture she seemed to relish far more than his kiss. She laughed, a delighted little trill of sound.

I looked around, shocked. The crack of the woman's hand against the man's face had been as loud as a scream, but nobody except me had even turned their heads. Even Nathyrra and Imloth didn't falter. I did, a little, then recovered hastily. When we were a safe distance away, I hissed, "What was that all about?"

Nathyrra didn't answer. Imloth did, his voice stripped of all inflection. "He did not please."

Those words did for my libido what a late spring frost did for cherry blossoms. I swallowed, trying to keep the horror away from my face. A million little sights I'd seen and offhand remarks I'd heard since I met my first drow came together all at once, and I looked around, my blood suddenly turning to ice water as I noticed things I hadn't quite noticed before.

A drow woman strolled by, eyed a mostly-shirtless man at the bar, and stopped to slide both hands over his ass and whisper something in his ear. I might have thought they were together, but the way the man froze and lost his smile said otherwise, as did the blank-faced and docile way he put down his drink and let her take him by the hand and lead him away.

I turned my head again and saw a group of men chatting quietly by a brazier, right up until a group of women passed and the men all went still and silent and looked at the ground until the women were gone, and then they all relaxed and started talking again as if nothing had happened, only it wasn't _nothing_ , it was them acting like a group of deer who'd just been buzzed by a wolf pack.

I followed Nathyrra in a haze. She led us to a table near one of the tavern's few windows, about halfway across the room from the entrance. The window was stained-glass, half-obscured with heavy red drapes. The pattern looked like a spider's web. I stared at it and thought how much better it would look in pieces.

Air moved, making the drapes ripple and sway.

Then, all of a sudden, a wave of dizziness came over me, and _I_ swayed.

A hand touched my shoulder. It was Imloth, his face concerned. "Are you well?" he asked softly.

 _He_ was asking _me_ this? I took a deep breath, fighting back both that sudden dizziness and the urge to apologize on behalf of all womanhood. It wouldn't do a damn bit of good, anyway. No apology could make up for this, although razing it to the ground and starting over from the ashes just might. "Fine," I said shortly. I sank into the nearest chair, trying to keep my suddenly weak knees from turning it into a drop. I looked around – everyone else seemed to lounge rather than sit, so I mimicked them and waved Imloth towards the neighboring chair with a murmured, "Please." He bowed his head briefly and sat, with that practiced sensuality that almost seemed a second nature to him, and in light of what I'd just seen, it was abruptly clear as to _why_ it was second nature. Of _course_ he knew how to be appealing to women. Drow men who couldn't do that ended up spitting their own teeth out on the floor.

 _Fuck_ , I thought. _This is fucked up in so many ways, it hurts._

Imloth's eyes met mine. "Do not let it disturb you, priestess," he said, his voice low. "Such is the way of things, among those who follow the Spider Queen."

My lip curled before I could stop it. "It shouldn't be." Half the stuff going on in here had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with power.

Imloth spoke through his usual easy smile, but I couldn't stop seeing the tightness around his eyes, belying the smile. It was as if a mask had fallen away from his face, or maybe it was more that the scales had fallen from _my_ eyes, showing me what was truly there. "I agree," he said. "But anger serves no purpose." He raised his eyebrows. "We are here to enjoy ourselves, yes?"

Obligingly, I wrenched my snarl around into a fake smile. My voice didn't change, though. "I thought we were here to show that I'm not afraid."

Nathyrra sank into the chair across from me. "Yes," she said. "But we are also here to cultivate allies, which we cannot do if you take offense at their customs." She studied my face, and the ice in hers thawed a little. "I am sorry. It has been painful for me, too, to see the truth of my people in the light of Eilistraee, but if we are to change anything, we must first survive this war, and in order to survive this war, we must be practical."

I took a deep breath and nodded infinitesimally. She was right, and I needed to calm down or I else was going to do something stupid. _Pretend you're at a charity dinner,_ I told myself _. Everyone's waiting to see you fuck up, so give 'em a great big smile and disappoint the hell out of 'em._ Behind my smile _,_ I forced my jaw to unclench. "Fine." I looked around. "What do we do to get some food around here?" I wasn't really hungry, but maybe I'd feel better with something other than wine in my stomach.

Nathyrra relaxed once she saw me relax. "Servants will bring it. We take what we wish, and they give us tokens."

Imloth smiled beatifically. "Which the Seer will pay for, as this is a, hmm, diplomatic effort," he added.

That was a weird way to do it – not the open tab and settling of accounts by a generous host, which was the mechanism by which a lot of the city's movers and shakers had once enjoyed lunch on the Blumenthal dime, but the not-ordering-food thing. "We don't tell them what to bring?"

Nathyrra and Imloth exchanged glances. "Ah…no," Nathyrra said. "If we did that, it would be known what we will choose to eat before it arrives to the table – knowledge that an assassin may exploit."

It took an effort not to look at Nathyrra's hand to check if that little purple anti-poison ring was still there – besides, her gloves would have hidden it, anyway. "So what if somebody poisons all the food?"

Nathyrra looked almost shocked. "That would never happen."

That was surprising. I thought these drow loved killing each other – it was just the Seer's people who'd gone cold turkey on cold-blooded murder. "Why not? Is it against the law?"

Nathyrra gave me a disconcerted look, as if I'd just asked a very dumb question. "No. It is simply not done, and if it happened, the tavern owner and all those who came into contact with the food would be put to death for their foolishness in allowing it to happen."

"What about the people who did the poisoning? Would they be punished?"

"If they were foolish enough to get caught? Yes." She shrugged. "But you need not worry. Drow do not kill indiscriminately. We admire the precise and ruthless elimination of an enemy, but mass poisoning is so…" She trailed off uncertainly.

My tone was so sprightly it damn near shot through the ceiling. "Uncivilized?"

Nathyrra actually seemed to give my suggestion a moment's thought. "I was going to say 'unsubtle'. But, yes. That, too."

So this was like a cocktail reception with a side of Russian Roulette. Trays went around, and you took what you wanted and hoped like hell nobody was feeling 'unsubtle'. "All right, then," I said. On the balance, I didn't think anyone was going to kill me just yet – not until their curiosity was satisfied, and I could really use a bite to eat, while I was still alive to eat it. I was feeling lightheaded. _Must be the wine on an empty stomach_. I glanced at a nearby table and didn't recognize a single thing anyone was eating. "Since I have no idea what's good, it looks like you guys get to choose."

The smile Nathyrra gave me was surprised, and a little pleased. "Of course. Thank you. I…appreciate your trust." She flagged down an approaching waiter with a commanding flick of her fingers, and brightened when she saw his tray. "Oh! You will like this, I think."

The waiter was another male, this one wearing a few strips of grey silk, silver bangles on every limb, and lots of swirly silver-and-turquoise body paint. He whisked three plates off the tray at Nathyrra's orders, added three goblets of that blue wine, bowed deeply while balancing his tray in one hand, and sashayed off, all without lifting his eyes from the floor or speaking.

I inspected my plate. It was actually a slab of black slate. On it was a neat, cone-shaped pile of tiny, minnow-like fish, dusted in some kind of reddish flour and deep-fried whole. _Well, at least it's not bugs,_ I thought, stabbed one with my fork, and ate it. It was mild, crunchy, and a little salty, with a slight kick of heat from the flour coating. "Not bad," I mused, and ate another one.

Nathyrra smiled. " _Inluleith,_ they are called," she explained. "Young cave fish. A rare treat." She picked one up in her fingers, considered it, then ate it with visible pleasure. "We seldom had such things in Menzoberranzan. They do not travel well, and we do not have access to water as Lith My'athar does."

I wasn't even going to try to repeat any of those crazy drow words like _inlu-fucked-if-I-know_ and _Menzo-thingamawhozit_. I was having enough trouble just remembering how to say 'hello' and 'goodbye'. "Is that where you're from?" I asked. Nathyrra nodded. I turned to Imloth, suddenly curious. "How about you?"

Imloth smiled at me. "I am from Ched Nasad." He looked at my uncomprehending face and added, "It is close to Menzoberranzan, which also is not very far from here."

Nathyrra almost dropped her fish. "Truly? You are from Ched Nasad?"

Imloth looked back at her steadily. "Yes."

Nathyrra looked nonplussed. "You never said."

Imloth shrugged. "You never asked."

Nathyrra looked down at her plate and bit her lip. "No. I…did not, did I?" She cleared her throat. "I apologize. I…should have asked."

 _Wow. That's amazing. He's from Ched Nasad. Where the fuck is Ched Nasad?_ My ignorance of Underdark geography aside, though, the silence that fell between the two drow was threatening to get awkward unless somebody filled it. Fortunately, I was good at talking – as Valen had been so kind to imply, it was shutting up I had trouble with. I picked up my wine glass and gestured at Nathyrra with it. "So, what do you eat in Menzoberranzan, if it's not fish?"

Nathyrra looked up, her face easing a little. "Oh. Well. Many things." She thought for a moment. "I always enjoyed _vulo_." Suddenly, she turned to Imloth. "You also ate that in Ched Nasad, no?" she asked, her voice strangely earnest, like she was trying to make up for the fact that she'd worked with him for however long and never bothered to ask him where he was from.

Imloth smiled. "We did." He turned to me, gesturing as he explained. " _Vulo_ is a dish that is cooked at the table. You take pieces of meat-"

Nathyrra interrupted eagerly. "Oh, yes! Rothe, typically." She frowned. "I am not sure what the surfacer equivalent would be."

"Cow, I think," Imloth mused. "And also tarsk, which is like those ugly things…" He paused, then let out an annoyed huff. "You know. They are pink and short and smell terrible."

I squinted thoughtfully. "You mean pigs?" It was either that or a sunburned dwarf.

Imloth pointed at me. "Yes! Thank you. That is the word. And…" He paused, then sighed again and turned to Nathyrra, rattling off a few incomprehensible syllables in drowish.

Nathyrra nodded, listening. "Cave fishers," she translated. "And lizards. And sometimes commoners will eat stirges, or bats."

"Or worms," Imloth added. He looked at my face and hastened to reassure me. "They are not bad. The ones in Ched Nasad are very sweet." He leaned back, warming to his story. "Anyway, you take the meat and put it on a stick and cook it in the pot with rothe butter-"

"Not too much," Nathyrra put in. She wrinkled her nose. "We had a cook who always let the meat stay in the pot too long."

"Yes, it is best not too much cooked," Imloth agreed. "And then, when it is cooked, you take it out and dip it in a sauce."

"There are many sauces – some sweet, some salty, some cold and some hot," Nathyrra added. Her smile had a tinge of nostalgia. "My favorite was made with sweetened _tastas_ nuts."

Imloth grinned. "Do you know that there is a merchant's stall which sells _tastas_ candy here?"

Nathyrra's lips parted, and suddenly, her chill was gone, and an almost childlike delight replaced it. "Truly? I had no idea. Which stall?"

Imloth looked at her and smiled. His smile was affectionate and amused and a little wistful. "I will show you, if you wish it."

The drow woman shied back a little, like a startled horse. Then, hesitantly, she smiled. "I would like that."

I hid a smile, myself. Where candy was concerned, Nathyrra was ninety-two going on two-and-a-half. "What's a tastas candy?" I asked.

Nathyrra turned to me. "Oh, it is a marvelous thing," she gushed. "You must try it. It-"

Whatever she was going to say, it evaporated, unsaid, at the sound of a footstep – a deliberate noise, followed by a rustle of silk and a clink of jewelry. " _Vendui_ ," a new voice said. It was high and breathy and its Common sounded impeccable. "I beg your pardon for the intrusion. Will you indulge a word?"

At the sound of the newcomer's voice, Nathyrra straightened and turned, and just like that, the girl was gone and the ice queen was back. "I am not the one to whom you should speak," she said smoothly, and gestured to me.

The woman smiled faintly. "Of course," she murmured, and turned to me, dipping her chin in a precisely calibrated nod. "A fair revel to you, priestess."

I indulged myself in a good look at the newcomer. It was one of the artsy My'afins, a woman in a green-and-white dress made of knotted silk cords that twined around her like vines. Her eyes were amber, and her hair was caught in a net of what looked like fine mithril chain. "Of course," I echoed her, and gestured to the empty chair next to Imloth. I didn't add anything else, just put on a politely inquiring smile and waited. Daddy had always said that the first to speak in a negotiation was the first to give ground, and I had no reason to doubt him. Besides, I was kind of curious what this lady would say to fill my silence.

The lady seated herself with fastidious grace, ignoring the man next to her. "I am Imrae My'afin," she introduced herself, touching her hand lightly to her chest.

I inclined my head. "You know who I am."

Imrae raised a fine white eyebrow. "I do," she acknowledged. Her amber eyes roamed over me, neutral. "I will admit, I was curious to see this _rivvil_ who has caused such a stir in our city." She smiled. "So seldom do I meet a human who is, shall we say, so unencumbered."

I remembered the blonde woman in the market, and heard the clink of a collar in the word 'unencumbered' _._ I didn't know much about drow, but I knew a verbal dig when I heard one. I stared at her and let my silence stretch out just a beat longer than was comfortable. Then, abruptly, I smiled and spread my arms wide, offering her an unimpeded view of my _unencumbered_ neck. "Then you're in luck," I said. "Because here I am."

Imrae laughed softly. "So you are." She leaned back, crossing her legs and studying me with insolent curiosity. "Tell me, then. What do you think of us and our revels, now that you have seen them?"

I took a sip of wine. "Adequate," I said in a voice like a yawn _._ "So far." I glanced around as if looking for entertainment and not finding it. "I imagine things will pick up soon."

"Oh?" Imrae affected surprise. "How strange. I thought you might find our revels quite wild. I have been told that surfacers are dull, their pleasures simple."

My pleasures were definitely simple, but dull? My college nickname hadn't been 'the cock whisperer' for nothing. "Oh, I don't know about that," I drawled. "I was pretty notorious, back in the day."

Imrae uttered a lilting little laugh, the way society ladies did when they were being polite but privately thought you were full of shit. My stepmother had done that a lot. "Truly? Then perhaps I should extend you an invitation to one of our House revels." Her smile turned salacious. "House My'afin is known for its appreciation of beauty - and pleasure." Her eyes creased in a warm smile. "Of course, I will gladly guarantee your safety while you revel in my House, for it is impossible to enjoy oneself when one's mind is not at ease, no?"

I let my smile widen and warm, too, though I couldn't quite make it reach my eyes, which stayed cold. That 'unencumbered' remark had taken some chutzpah. "A House after my own heart."

The lady My'afin laughed again, and from there the conversation moved on to other things, all trivial – was the food to my liking, how did I find the city, which was my favorite sight, and all of those bullshit pleasantries people went through in situations like this. The fact that I was a couple miles underground, among a people who had a reputation for being so evil they made the Zhentarim look like a bunch of Girl Scouts, didn't quite erase the sense of eerie familiarity. This was like being back on my old social circuit, only I knew it really wasn't, and the clash between the polite nothings and the all-too-real menace that I knew had to be hiding right underneath them made me want to run, screaming, for the nearest exit.

Eventually, Imrae My'afin stood. "I wish you all joy of the revels here," she murmured, and smiled. Her teeth were small, white, and sharp. "Life is short – and some lives are shorter than others. Best to take what we can, while we can." Then she bowed, and drew away in a cloud of perfume and satin.

I watched her go. Once she was gone, I turned to Nathyrra. "What was _that_ about?" I muttered. "Did I seriously just get an invitation to a party at Chez My'afin?"

Nathyrra was frowning. "Yes, but be wary," she said, low and slow. "There is something you should know."

There was a lot I should know and didn't, from the sound of it. "Which is?"

The former assassin spoke quickly and quietly. "Among the drow who follow Lolth's ways, while one never makes a promise without loopholes, it is frowned upon to violate the letter of one's word – but only when promises are given to another drow."

I thought I saw where this was going. "And if you make a promise to somebody who isn't drow?"

Nathyrra looked a little down and away, avoiding my eyes. Her face was calm, but her fingers plucked at her sleeve. If this were a round of poker, she'd already have lost, because that right there was a clear tell. She was uncertain, maybe even embarrassed. "If a promise is given to _colnbluth_ , to non-drow, then words bind no one and guarantee nothing, and any agreement can be violated at will."

I stared at my wine glass. "You're telling me that anything anyone here says to me is pretty much meaningless."

Nathyrra's head snapped up. "Not anyone," she protested. Her hand reached out. "The Seer has seen that you would be our ally, and you have proven it by your actions. Valen has told me of how hard you have fought for us, and the dangers you have risked. I would not repay that by lies or betrayal. Nor would Imloth." She turned to Imloth for support. "Is that not right?"

The drow man raised his glass to me, grave for once. "Eilistraee forfend."

Blood rushed to my cheeks. Valen had been gossiping again, it seemed, but I couldn't even be angry with him. Not when he'd apparently been saying nice things, for once. "It's not you I'm worried about," I muttered. "It's finding anything of use in anything these people say to me."

Nathyrra relaxed and gave me a brief smile. "Perhaps My'afin may not have malice in mind, for now," she reassured me. "Their House colors are white and yellow, but here they wear white and green. That is telling."

I didn't get it. "Er. Okay. What's it telling?"

"Green and gold are the House colors of Vharzyym."

I thought of the lady in the deep winged chair – her and her obviously out-of-place parrot and her green-and-gold outfit. Had I glimpsed a member of the elusive Vharzyym, in the flesh? "So Imrae was wearing a combo of both House colors to show support for Vharzyym?" I asked.

"Of course," Nathyrra said, her voice plainly surprised. "It would be the height of insolence for one House to wear another's colors in full, but to combine colors may be considered a tasteful tribute from a lesser House to a greater."

I frowned. _So My'afin's sucking up to Vharzyym._ Question was, whose side was Vharzyym on, and how far was My'afin willing to follow them? "I thought there were a dozen or more Houses in the city," I mused.

Nathyrra nodded. "Yes."

"So how do you avoid accidentally wearing somebody else's colors?"

Nathyrra looked shocked. "No drow noble would be foolish enough to do such a thing."

A blood-curdling thought occurred to me. I looked down at myself, in my midnight black and sunshine gold. "I'm not wearing anyone's colors, am I?"

At that, Nathyrra smiled. "None but your own."

A reluctant pride crept up on me. I wondered how dad would have reacted to all of this. _Probably barred the doors and called security_. I had no idea how mom would have reacted. She was just a face and a voice, to me – loved, but like a distant star. "House Blumenthal, eh?"

Imloth grinned. "Great Houses have risen from much less."

I wasn't really sure how to respond to that. "Yeah, well, just don't ask me to be Matron. I'd be a terrible mother."

Nathyrra's lips twisted. "You cannot possibly be worse than mine."

From what I'd heard of drow Matrons, I could actually believe that. "I don't think that's much of a compliment," I murmured, getting a short, humorless chuckle from Nathyrra. I looked around. I still felt a little woozy. "Is there any more food around here?"

Nathyrra signaled another waiter, and I learned two things: one, that the drow liked their food raw, and two, that in spite of this, they were unabashed carnivores.

A fish with blue flesh and four spines arrived, cleaned and splayed open on a flat, polished black stone. Some kind of slivered and fried tuber had been shaped into a little nest on top of the fish, with a dollop of glistening black caviar in the middle. "Wingfish," Nathyrra explained. "They are caught in nets in the deep lakes." The fish was raw, its sweet flesh reminding me a little of lobster, and the caviar had a briny, juicy pop.

After that, ruby red slices of meat were displayed on another slab of slate, this one dark gray, with thinly sliced raw mushrooms and a drizzle of oil over the top. "Rothe meat," Nathyrra told me, and the meat did taste like beef, though with a pungent aftertaste that Nathyrra said came from the oil, which was infused with some kind of truffle.

 _These guys would make a killing back home_ , I mused. This reminded me of some restaurants I used to go to – the kinds where the chefs spent days laboring over dishes that were fantastically expensive, fantastically arranged, and fantastically small. My family had been adamant about taking me to those places as soon as I was old enough to hold a salad fork, because the sooner I learned how to behave in those environments, the better. _"Deals are made and broken over meals,"_ Dad always told me. _"You need to know how to be gracious, even if they're feeding you swill and bullshit and all you really want to do is bash their heads in with the soup tureen and go get a hamburger – because that temptation_ _ **will**_ _come, little peach, and if you don't want to throw away the baby with the bathwater, you need to know how to smile and say the right things and never let on that you hate their guts."_ I used to think he was crazy. Now, I wasn't so sure.

I was thoughtfully chasing the last mushroom around on my plate when another shadow darkened our table. I looked up.

Our latest visitor was a woman – of course – and she was dressed in subdued hues, all blue and gray, and far more tamely than Imrae My'afin. With her dark skin and her pale copper hair, she looked like a distant storm at sunset. Her hair was unusual for a drow, but I wasn't impressed. If she wanted to know what a real redhead looked like, there was one up at the temple of Lolth whose fiery crimson locks put hers to shame.

This lady didn't wait for an invitation, but slid into the empty seat and smiled at me, cocking her head. " _Vendui_ ," she said. "Forgive my presumption, but I could not restrain my curiosity. Are you the one who has brought those marvelous golems to our city?"

Automatically, I placed my fork and knife on my plate – parallel, angled just so, fork tines down, the way I'd been taught and _fuck me I can't believe I just did that_ – all the while staring at the newcomer with all the Blumenthal hauteur I could muster. "And you are?"

She met my eyes for a long, tense moment, then laughed, her eyes creasing in apparent merriment. "I? I am Matron Maelra Ischarri." She didn't bow. "And you, of course, are the surfacer who has dared to make an enemy of the Valsharess."

So this was the infamously over-ambitious Ischarri risk-hound, in the flesh. She certainly seemed to like pushing her luck. Was she trying to see how hard I'd push back? _Let's find out._ "I think it's more that the Valsharess dared to make an enemy of me," I answered, feigning all the confidence I didn't feel.

Maelra's smile widened. It took on a faint twist of mockery. She wasn't impressed. "A bold statement for anyone, most especially a surfacer." She leaned forward. "But enough of her. Tell me about these magnificent golems of yours. Are they truly sentient?"

I laughed. "As much as anyone is."

Maelra laughed, too. "Well said." Then she, too, made small talk for a while, and it all seemed very normal and civil until I remembered that this was the woman who'd murdered her entire adopted family, at which point the normality itself seemed deeply fucked-up.

Soon – not soon enough - Maelra Ischarri said her goodbyes and rose and bowed and left as briskly as she'd come.

Nathyrra frowned after her. "That was very, _very_ strange. Matrons do not normally leave their Houses for routine business. Nor do they tolerate questioning of any kind." She frowned a little longer, then shrugged. "Then again, Maelra Ischarri is not a typical Matron. She was born a commoner. Perhaps she sees things…differently." She tapped her chin with a gloved forefinger. "I wonder what she wished to achieve by speaking to us."

I knew that Ischarri made magical items – they'd probably made that map Vharzyym had given me – and that Maelra Ischarri was going places, but what her interest was in me and what her alliance with Vharzyym was all about, I hadn't a clue. I felt like I was dog-paddling in an Olympic swimming pool – everyone else was pulling past me, and it was all I could do to keep my ahead above the waves they were raising. "Your guess is as good as mine," I said. I thought about it. "But if I had to guess, they're fishing."

Nathyrra raised her eyebrows. "Fishing? What do you mean by that?"

I frowned, trying to find the right words. "We're the newest thing," I explained. "Me especially, since I showed up about a tenday ago and started making waves." Maybe the golems had been a mistake. They'd be good allies, but they'd also painted a hell of a target on my forehead. "The drow here are curious. They want to see what the fuss is about, maybe even see if they can learn something useful."

Nathyrra cocked her head, then nodded slowly. "They are taking our measure. Yes. I think that is a fair assessment."

"You could put it that way." Now, if only I felt like I'd gathered any information here except for confirmation that the drow were nuts, I'd be a lot happier. I pushed aside my wine glass, barely touched. My head felt fuzzy, my stomach felt tight, and for once in my life, I had no urge to drink. There was too much happening, and I needed my brain – such as it was – to process it all.

The next course arrived. I stared at it. "Wow," I said weakly. "That's….a lot of legs."

Nathyrra inspected my plate. "It is a cave centipede. You crack the legs open and suck the meat out. They are very prized." She looked at me curiously. "Do you have nothing similar on the surface?"

 _Only if we don't clean under the bed often enough._ I swallowed hard. "Not…really, no."

"Oh." Nathyrra looked at my face. Then, showing tact for once, she pulled my plate towards her. "Well, it is not to everyone's taste. Imloth, will you-" She paused. Abruptly, the still, remote mask of the professional Nathyrra fell over her face. " _Vith._ Do not look now, but Zessyr Mae'vir just entered."

It took every ounce of my self-control not to spin around like a top. "Is she alone?"

Nathyrra broke a centipede leg in half. It made a wet cracking sound. "No. She has servants. And…" Her voice lowered. "Red and black. Kilanatlar. The sixth son, I think. Chaszmyr is his name."

Kilanatlar was the Second House – assassins and alchemists with an oddball Matron who let her boys play bigger games than most Matrons did, probably because there was shadow magic in the male bloodline and that made them too valuable to mistreat. "But Zessyr's been kicked out of the House. Why's she got Chaz stuck to her ass?"

Nathyrra's forehead furrowed in mystification. "Stuck to her…" She trailed off. Then her face smoothed in comprehension. "Oh! You mean that he follows her very closely. Yes." She shrugged. "Even disgraced, Zessyr is still the First – and only – Daughter of the First House. Perhaps, by cultivating her, Kilanatlar hopes to influence the future of House Mae'vir in their favor."

I remembered what Valen and Nathyrra had told me about the constant fight to the top that was drow society. "Yeah. Or Kilanatlar wants to sabotage Mae'vir by playing both sides until Mae'vir tears itself apart, and they can scoop up whatever's left." I frowned. "Do we know whether there's another Kilanatlar son following My'rune around?"

"I do not know, but I suspect as much. It would raise too much suspicion for Kilanatlar to be seen with the daughter and not the mother, but as long as they have insinuated themselves with both, both will attempt to use the alliance to their advantage." Nathyrra glanced away and back with just a flicker of her eyes. "Zessyr has left, but Kilanatlar is watching us. Speak normally. We must betray no discomfort. It will be taken as a sign of weakness."

 _Talk about performance anxiety._ A little desperately, I turned to Imloth. "So, uh. You said you came from Ched Nasad. Were you born there?"

Imloth nodded. "I was born to commoners – fabric merchants and, how do you say, those who dress others in lovely things."

I thought. "Tailors?"

Imloth grinned. "Yes, exactly. Tailors." His grin slipped almost imperceptibly. "It was not a bad life, but dangerous. Nobles do as they wish to those beneath them." His voice was light, but he didn't look at Nathyrra. "My mother wished me to rise in station, so she saved enough to buy me entry to the academy of fighting, where I learned swordplay from many great masters."

So his parents had been tailors. That explained his flair for fashion, if nothing else. "What did you do after you graduated?"

My question seemed to entertain him. He laughed. "I? I fought for coin, and I pleased females." His tone and his smile were a little self-derisive. "Eventually, I did these things well enough that a Matron Mother took me as her master-at-arms – and her mate."

Well, that was a horrifying statement, all things considered. _Don't make an issue of it. You'll just make it awkward._ I kept my tone light. "Hell of a promotion, for a tailor's son."

Imloth laughed. "Quite," he agreed. "Though it was not easy. To please a drow female, it is not enough to be beautiful and skilled. You must also never be dull - and you must be properly submissive, but not too much, because females will lose interest if their prey is _too_ easy to catch." He flashed a devilish grin. "And, of course, you may still die any moment at the whim of a female or the knife of a rival, but this adds a certain, hmm, excitement."

Nathyrra toyed with her goblet. Her shoulders had a slightly guilty forward hunch to them. "I did not kill any of _my_ lovers," she mumbled, to no one in particular.

I wasn't sure how to respond to that. Congratulations seemed excessive, but condolences seemed premature. I looked around, groping for something to say. My eyes fell on an approaching figure. "Uh, Nathyrra?" I said from the corner of my mouth. "I think Chaz is coming this way."

Nathyrra closed her eyes briefly, as if despairing. "For the love of Eilistraee, please do not call him that where he can hear you," she hissed back. She glanced at Imloth, a little apologetically. "And do not acknowledge him until he has spoken. It is…not done. Here, if a male wishes your attention, he must earn it."

It was a little friggin' hard not to acknowledge someone who was walking towards you with clear intent to start up a conversation. _Make that a lot friggin' hard._ Fortunately, the Kilanatlar son made it easy on me. As soon as he got to our table, he saluted us, fist-to-chest, bowed until he was almost bent in half, and spoke to a point on the floor that was equidistant between me and Nathyrra. " _Jabbressin._ Honored females." His voice was smooth and a little throaty. "I humbly ask your indulgence for my intrusion, but I bring a message from the scion of Mae'vir."

Nathyrra was quiet, but her eyes flicked to me in a meaningful way. I took her hint and turned to the Kilanatlar. "What is it?" I asked brusquely, since that seemed to be the way women spoke to men around here.

Chaz held his bow and kept his eyes glued to the floor. "The First Daughter of Mae'vir extends her welcome, and begs you both to attend her in her private quarters."

 _Both?_ That implied that Imloth wasn't invited. Nathyrra looked at me over Chaz's bowed head. I looked at her. She shrugged and nodded. Imloth, when I looked at him, did the same. I turned back to Chaz. "We'd be honored," I said. I didn't like it, but saying 'no' to an ostensibly polite invitation from a member of the most powerful House in our host city didn't seem like a wise move. "Lead the way."

The drow I couldn't help but think of as Chaz straightened, smiling very slightly. "It would be my pleasure," he said smoothly, and stood back a respectable distance, beckoning for us to stand and join him.

Wordless, Nathyrra rose like a queen from her throne. I stood, or started to. Another wash of weakness came over me, and I had to lean on the table for a second before I was able to stand all the way. _What the fuck is this?_ I felt like I'd just run a marathon, shaking legs and wooziness included. Fighting to hide my sudden bout of weakness, I followed Nathyrra and our escort.

I studied the sixth son of Kilanatlar as he led us to Zessyr. His hair was clipped very short – unusual for any elf, as far as I'd ever seen, and especially unusual for a drow. His cheekbones were high and sharp, his chin chiseled, and his eyes were as copper as pennies. He had a red-lined black cloak thrown rather insouciantly over one shoulder and clasped with a red onyx pin carved in the shape of a dagger. Underneath it, he was dressed in supple black leather – form-fitting, but more ready-for-action than ready-for-my-closeup.

He led us up a flight of metal stairs to the balcony overlooking the tavern proper. It was quiet and dark there, away from the crush, and empty except for a few drow who were leaning on the railing, chatting softly and watching the goings-on below.

The wall opposite the balcony's rail was lined with metal doors. Chaz led us to one of the doors, turned smoothly, met my eyes for a split-second, smiled, and bowed with a flourish of his cloak. "As promised," he murmured. "Beyond you will find the fair Zessyr."

I wasn't sure who should walk in first. Nathyrra resolved the issue by doing it herself, striding over the threshold as if she owned the fucking place.

The room beyond looked like a sitting room, with a door leading to a private bedchamber. There was a dining table, a desk, and a three chairs, all stone-carved and gilded opulence. The air smelled sweet and heavy, like incense.

Zessyr Mae'vir was seated in the largest chair, a big onyx-and-velvet thing that looked like a throne. She was gowned in flame-orange and pitch black, with her hair woven into a tall, elaborate black diadem. Her head turned as we entered. She didn't rise. "Welcome," she said. Her eyes were dark like Nathyrra's, and her voice was like chocolate, but not the nice kind. More like the kind with razor blades in it. "I am pleased that you had the wisdom to accept my invitation."

I stopped next to Nathyrra and took my first good look at the sole heiress to House Mae'vir. _Fair Zessyr?_ I almost burst into laughter. The woman had a face only a mother could love, a fact which only got funnier when you considered that her mom actually hated her guts.

Nathyrra bowed. "First Daughter," she said smoothly. "We thank you for your most courteous invitation." She straightened. "My ally is not well-versed in our ways. Please forgive her if she does not observe the proper forms."

Zessyr's gaze moved to me. "Strength speaks for itself, Nathyrra of no House," she said, and nodded to me as calmly as if she hadn't just driven a verbal dagger into Nathyrra's heart. "Rebecca, of House Blumenthal. I have heard of you. Be welcome." Her hand floated to one side, wrist-up, a careless gesture towards the empty chairs. A ring flashed – a huge, gaudy globe of gold filigree on a thick band, like a birdcage sitting on her finger. "And be at ease. Will you take refreshment?"

I tried not to look at Nathyrra's face, but I didn't even need to. The tension suddenly pouring off of her said it all. _Holy shit._ Anger surged, taking a hold of my tongue. I didn't sit. "I'll take an apology." Some vestige of my father's pride made my spine go stiff as a rail, and I looked down at the drow from the vantage point of five-ten of me and another three or so inches of heel. She may have been powerful, but she was also small and cruel and I knew I was making mistake but I was _done_ with drow games. "I'll take it on behalf of my friend, who did you the courtesy of accepting your invitation, only to get insulted the moment she walked through the door."

Zessyr stared at me blankly. Then she laughed. "Well done," she complimented me. "I had heard that you are a potent female, for a _rivvil_ , and not easily cowed." Her smile sharpened, showing a glimpse of teeth. "Of course, I had also heard that you are foolish. Time will tell which truth holds fastest." As if she hadn't just called me a fool, she turned to Nathyrra, smiling pleasantly-yet-not. "But let us be courteous, as you say. I apologize for my careless words. I meant no insult, of course." She waved us towards the chairs again. "Please. Sit." She waited until we'd complied, then went on. "You are fortunate that I am patient, and that I see what others do not."

Nathyrra reclined in her chair, her dark face impassive. "What do you see, First Daughter?" she asked.

Zessyr accepted a goblet from one of her servants, and turned to address Nathyrra. "I see that many in our city fear the Valsharess. I see that many in the city dismiss your rebels as weak – rothé who blindly follow a goddess who is too weak to wrest her mother's power from her, as is proper."

Nathyrra nodded calmly. "And you? What is your perception?"

Zessyr laughed. "I? I perceive that now is the time for boldness, not caution." Her eyes burned. "I know that I am young and strong. I know that my mother grows old and weak." As she spoke, she leaned forward, and her voice grew more and more fervent. "I know that this city is _mine_ , by right. I know that I have waited too long for my throne to cede it to this self-styled Queen of the Drow. I know that I stand to gain much, if the Valsharess is denied her conquest."

Nathyrra took all of that in as if Zessyr had just been rattling off a grocery list and not ranting megalomaniacally. "We all stand to gain a great deal," was all she said.

Zessyr's fervor faded, a little. She straightened, acknowledging Nathyrra's statement with a nod. "Yes. We have common cause, you and I." She looked at Nathyrra and smiled. "I know you must yearn to destroy your former mistress – she who took your birthright from you, and seeks to take mine from me."

Nathyrra went still. Her eyes darted, first to me then to the Mae'vir daughter. "I-"

Zessyr seemed to sense her advantage. Leaning forward again, she pressed it. "Ally with me," she urged, and her grin was as cold and hungry as a crocodile's. "Ally with me, you and your Seer and your _rivvil_ , and together we will pull down this would-be queen." She laughed a merry little laugh. "I shall take her heart for myself, of course, but the hearts of your former sisters, I leave to you - as a token of my esteem." Smiling coyly, she leaned back again, eyeing Nathyrra over the rim of her glass. "Would you like that, Nathyrra of the Red Sisters?"


	39. Red

_True friends stab you in the front._

\- Oscar Wilde

~*~  
Chapter 39: Red  
~*~

I stared, shock-frozen. _Fuck me harder_. A Red Sister. Nathyrra – sugar-fiending, girly, hyper-competent and yet bizarrely naïve Nathyrra - had been a Red Sister. She hadn't just been an assassin. She'd worked for the Valsharess. The woman who wanted me dead. The woman who'd taken Silent Partner from me. The woman who was the whole reason I was down here in the first place. _That bitch._ Nathyrra had been one of _hers_.

I hadn't heard that right. I couldn't have heard that right, but from the look on Nathyrra's face, I had.

Nathyrra's face had gone as cold and remote as the Spine of the World, and she didn't so much stare _at_ Zessyr as _through_ her, her black eyes fixed on some distant galaxy. "Very well. What is it that you wish of me, First Daughter?"

A slow smile spread across Zessyr's pug face. She leaned back in her chair, resting her elbows on its arms in a pose of queenly relaxation. "Rumor speaks softly, and often falsely," she said. "But hear a rumor often enough, and it takes on the ring of truth." She sipped from her goblet, unhurried, as if she knew she had Nathyrra on the hook and was relishing every second of it. "For instance, it is rumored that House Kant'tar defied the Valsharess, and was destroyed. It is also rumored that after the fall of your House, you were hunted by the Red Sisters, who found you no easy meat."

Nathyrra's expression didn't change. "What else have you heard?"

Zessyr kept smiling. "It is also rumored that after several of her best assassins died at your hands, the Valsharess recognized your superior skill and proposed an alliance – your service, in exchange for her forgiveness. And it is rumored that you accepted her offer, and after you completed your training, you came to be one of her most trusted lieutenants."

Nathyrra's voice was monotone. "Trust is death."

Zessyr inclined her head as if in prayer. "May it be hers," she breathed. Her eyes searched Nathyrra's face. "You know her mind."

At last, some emotion seemed to break through Nathyrra's mask. It was a smile, tiny and grim. No other part of her face moved - just her lips. "No one knows the mind of the Valsharess. Not even the Valsharess herself."

Zessyr smiled like a tiger. "What is she like?"

Nathyrra paused. "Terrible." She paused again. "Terror-ridden."

"What does she fear?"

Nathyrra's answer was almost robotic. "Failure."

Zessyr cocked her head. "A reasonable fear," she observed. "Especially for one who has climbed to such heights as she, and has so far to fall."

At last, Nathyrra's gaze returned to this universe. Her eyes refocused on Zessyr. "You did not invite me – us – here to speculate on the Valsharess's mental state."

"No, I did not," Zessyr acknowledged. "As I said, I offer an alliance."

Nathyrra didn't look at me, as if she'd given up on the courtesy of pretending I was really a part of this negotiation. _Be quiet, human. Your superiors are speaking._ "I am listening," she said shortly. "What are your terms?"

Zessyr's smile turned pleased, as if she saw her prey in sight. "My mother crouches in her fortress, feeble and fearful in her old age. She has agreed to join in the resistance, but as news of the Valsharess's conquests continue to reach her, she questions the wisdom of her own decision." Zessyr sneered. "She allows herself to think that perhaps the Valsharess is too strong to resist."

Slowly, Nathyrra's head swiveled, until she was staring at Zessyr dead-on. "You are no longer in your mother's counsel. How do you know what she thinks?"

Zessyr's breath hissed through her teeth. She heaved upright, her relaxed pose evaporating and her voice rising. "You dare to question me, _dobluth_?" she spat.

For a long moment, Nathyrra stared back, unblinking. Then she did blink, once, as if she'd just remembered how. "Forgive me, _ust dalharil_. I mis-spoke." Her voice was mechanical, but her eyes said, _"Back in the day, you upstart bitch, I could have eaten you alive and you'd have thanked me for the attention."_ I knew, because I would have said the exact same thing, in her place. Us fallen heiresses were a proud, pathetic bunch.

Zessyr glowered at her a moment longer, then slowly, she leaned back again. "You did mis-speak. But I am a forgiving female, so I will not take your tongue for it – this time." Taking a breath, she waved her hand, as if brushing Nathyrra's question away. "Regardless. They say that age brings wisdom, but age has only diminished my mother's ambition and made her blind to the reality of our predicament. She thinks only of her legacy, and has deluded herself into believing that if she gives the Valsharess what she desires, the Valsharess will show our House mercy and allow it to continue."

Nathyrra's face got even blanker. "That hope is an illusion. The Valsharess knows neither mercy nor gratitude. What she desires, she takes, and her thanks, if they come, come as swift death."

Zessyr nodded in satisfaction. "Precisely. Unlike my mother, however, _I_ believe that this city is strong enough to stand. _I_ see the glorious constructs which now walk our walls, each one worth at least a dozen soldiers. _I_ hear of your new ally, who defeated a powerful sorceress and buried her enemy in the ruins of her own ambition." Zessyr looked at me, appraising. "She is not drow, but after what I have heard, I would be a fool to deny her usefulness – or to give her to the Valsharess as a tribute, when I might use her to my own advantage." Zessyr's eyes turned back to Nathyrra. "Which brings us to my proposal – and to you, Red Sister."

Nathyrra seemed to withdraw into that cold and distant place again. "I have forsaken that name. And that life."

Zessyr shrugged. "All the more reason for you to stand against the Valsharess. Or do you think your death will be anything but slow and agonizing, after your defection?" Zessyr listened to Nathyrra's silence and smiled. "I thought not."

Nathyrra's voice was cool. "What is your proposal?"

Zessyr sighed. "Oh, very well. I see that you are in no mood to play." She propped her elbows on the arms of her chair and steepled her fingers, regarding Nathyrra through the cage of her long, polished fingernails. "My proposal is this: eliminate my mother for me."

Nathyrra nodded, as calmly as if Zessyr had just asked us to feed her cat while she went away for the weekend. "Do you have any preference as to the mode of her death?"

"I have no preference. It will suffice that she is dead."

Nathyrra kept on in that same dispassionate tone. "What words would you like said to her?"

Zessyr's lip curled. "None. I have nothing further to say to her."

"Understood. I presume that you would like the deed done as soon as possible?"

"The Valsharess is coming for us. If my mother is not dead before our enemy is at the gates, we will all fall." Zessyr's eyes flashed. " _Yes_ , you fool. I expect this to be done quickly."

Nathyrra had probably blinked twice in the past five minutes, and she didn't blink now. "Very well, but be aware that it will take some time to prepare. The Mae'vir fortress is well-guarded."

Zessyr waved a negligent hand. "I have other allies – ones well-versed in the art of infiltration and disarming magical traps. When the time comes, they will assist you." She smiled thinly. "As for the rest, gaining entry to the stronghold and my mother's chambers should be no trouble for an assassin of your skill." Her face contorted in a wild, vicious smile that was half a snarl. "The irony will be delicious. The great My'rune Mae'vir, who once stood so high in Lolth's favor, brought low by a heretic and a _rivvil_. My only regret is that I shall not see the look on her face when she realizes what a humiliating end I have brought her to."

Nathyrra nodded again. "And in exchange for this service? What do you offer?"

"My support," Zessyr replied at once. "I give you my word, I will not betray you to the Valsharess." She laughed bleakly. "Why should I? If she wins, Mae'vir will be made an example of for leading this rebellion, and I will soon be begging for the sweet release of death. If she loses, however, I will be Matron Mother of the First House of Lith My'athar, the one who defeated the Valsharess, and I will lead my House to the greatest glory it has ever known." Urgently, she shed her pensive pose and leaned forward once again, her eyes blazing and her lips parted in excitement. "Some in the city say that the Seer and her people are weak, and will bring us only defeat. Prove them wrong. Do this for me, and you will gain a powerful ally, the backing of this entire city, and the silencing of your enemies, all in one blow."

Nathyrra studied the other drow's face. "Your offer has merit," she said, after a pensive pause. "I will bring it to my Matron – to the Seer. To destroy another Matron is an act I cannot embark on without her blessing."

Zessyr rubbed her hands together briskly. "Excellent. Your obedience to your Matron is commendable. I can ask no more than that." She paused. "Of course, you understand that I will not wait too long for an answer. I have other supporters in this city." She clasped her hands, her big gold filigree ring shining on her ebony fingers. "If I must act without your assistance, I will do so – but if I cannot count the Seer as an ally, I can make no guarantee as to her safety, or to the safety of her people."

Nathyrra answered tonelessly. "I shall convey your words to her."

Zessyr nodded. "Good. You may go." She reached for her glass, already appearing to lose interest in us. Then, just as we'd finished standing, she spoke again, offhand. "Oh, and I am certain that I need not remind you that this conversation did not occur, and if you reveal my words to my enemies or, Lolth forfend, betray me to my mother, the things I will do to punish you will make you yearn for the tender mercies of the Valsharess."

Nathyrra bowed. "You are correct. We need no reminder."

Zessyr beamed. "Perfect." She turned away, flipping a hand at us. Her ring flashed. "Leave. Now."

Nathyrra and I filed into the hall without speaking. Chaz was waiting outside. He looked at me, and his copper eyes and white teeth flashed in a smile that would probably have cost him a few teeth if he'd tried it on that red-gowned lady downstairs, but it went by so quickly that he already had his eyes demurely lowered by the time the sight of his smile had filtered through to my brain. "Honored females," he said, making a leg. "May I be of further assistance to you?"

Nathyrra stared straight ahead. "No. You may leave us."

Chaz bowed with an almost certainly false air of meekness. "Then I will bid you farewell," he murmured, and vanished into Zessyr's private chamber.

Nathyrra and I stood in awkward silence, neither of us moving, as if neither of us could decide who should make the first move. Nathyrra stared straight ahead. She still wasn't blinking anywhere near often enough, and her hands were balled into fists at her side.

Suddenly, I couldn't stand it anymore. I spun and headed for the stairs.

I heard a sharp intake of breath. Nathyrra's footsteps hurried after me. "Rebecca, I-"

I stopped as suddenly as I'd moved. A too-vivid memory flashed through my head - a silver blade in a dark hand, raised to plunge into my carotid. My throat constricted. "Why didn't you tell me?" I demanded, without looking behind me.

The other woman's voice hissed low and taut, her words shooting out like bullets from a sling. "How would you have liked me to put it?"

I would have liked to know the truth instead of being left to run blind. Under other circumstances, her past would have been none of my business, but when her past was trying to fucking _kill_ me, when if not for timing and circumstance it could have been _her_ who'd been sent to do the deed, when I'd been so close to becoming friends with her and so badly in need of a friend… "I need air." My head was spinning and my hands were trembling. "I'm going outside." Without waiting for an answer, I made for the stairs.

Nathyrra dogged my heels. " _Please_ , just wait. It would be imprudent for you to leave now."

I had to grab the newel post to keep from stumbling off the last step. "Fuck prudence," I growled. I gathered myself and strode for the door. "Go talk to Imloth. Tell _him_ who you used to work for."

Nathyrra stopped. Her voice came to me, so quiet I barely caught it. "He knows."

My jaw clenched so hard, it hurt. Had I been the only one who didn't know? A thought struck me. My heart fluttered like a trapped bird. _Valen_. Had he known, and he hadn't told me? _God._ I couldn't take this. I had to get out of here.

I made my way to the nearest door. People looked at me curiously, but moved out of my way, probably because I had no intention of stopping and my manner said as much. That long, grim-faced, urban sidewalk stride of mine had to be good for _something_.

I passed the cluster of chairs near the fire. The high-backed chair was empty. The green-and-gold Vharzyym lady was gone, her and her pet parrot. I didn't stop. Presumably, she'd seen what she came to see – whatever that was.

I swept on.

The doorman – a different doorman and a different door from the one we'd come in by - saw me coming and opened the door for me. I breezed through with a curt nod. My hand itched to reach for my wallet and a tip, a generous one so he'd look the other way when I needed him to, later, but this was the wrong place and anyway my money was gone along with my influence, so I breezed on by, stepping around him and out into the cooler air of the cavern.

I found myself in an alleyway. It looked deserted. I breathed in the air, trying to stop my head from swimming. Wind moved against my skin. The twilight city twinkled all around me. I kind of hated it. I was sick of this neverending half-light and this underground chill that just kept seeping into my bones. I wanted to be warm again. I wanted to feel sunlight on my skin again, to close my eyes and see the insides of my eyelids flare red with heat and light.

But I was stuck here. I was stuck here until the Valsharess was dead or I was, and now it seemed that I'd had one of her former buddies standing next to me the whole time and everyone had known it and no one had told me. They'd probably been snickering up their sleeves at my obliviousness – _look at the dumb human, she's so clueless that she doesn't even know what she doesn't know_.

I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering. On top of everything else, I felt like I was coming down with the flu – a strange weakness was weighing on my limbs, my head felt stuffed with cotton wool, and I had a feeling that if I turned around too quickly I'd just get dizzy and fall over. Thing was, I almost never got sick. My constitution – and my alcohol tolerance - was so robust that Baz and Drogan had both joked that if I ever got tired of being human, I'd probably make a decent dwarf. Had some joker slipped poison in my food after all?

 _It can't be poison,_ I argued with myself. _Nathyrra said it wouldn't be._ Then I actually thought about that for a second and cursed my own stupidity – both for trusting her and for going anywhere without a potion of antidote in hand. So what if it ruined the lines of my dress? I was well past caring about that shit, at this time of my life.

Gradually, my temper faded. I stood and shivered for a while, getting chillier and chillier and feeling sillier and sillier. _This is stupid._ I couldn't just stand here indefinitely. Of course, I couldn't face the prospect of facing my so-called allies so soon after that little revelation, but I was going to have to, sooner or later, and I wasn't getting anything accomplished out here.

Sighing, I turned to go back into the tavern.

Darkness – thick, impenetrable, clinging – fell over me, stopping me in my tracks.

An instant later, an arm snaked around my neck and yanked me back against a firm, warm body. Breath tickled my ear. "Ah," a throaty voice whispered. "Alone at last."

* * *

 _A/N: Yes, that wasn't Rebecca's smartest moment. :D You may all call her a moron now. Rotten vegetables are in a box by the door. Throw a few at her on your way out._


	40. Heathens

_A/N: A long, drow-filled chapter for you, but with many convenient pauses for you to catch your breath. Enjoy. :)  
_

* * *

 _You'll never know the freakshow sitting next to you  
_ _You'll have some weird people sitting next to you  
_ _You'll think, "How'd I get here, sitting next to you?"  
_ _But after all I've said  
_ _Please don't forget_

 _All my friends are heathens. Take it slow_  
 _Wait for them to ask you who you know_  
 _Please don't make any sudden moves  
You don't know the half of the abuse_

\- Twenty One Pilots, "Heathens"

~*~  
Chapter 40: Heathens  
~*~

Darkness covered me. It was absolute.

"Hold still, if you please," the voice went on. It was low, but there was a strange distortion to it, as if it was being masked in some way. "I mean you no harm, but I will defend myself if I must."

I held very still. _Okay,_ I thought. _So, storming out of there alone wasn't one of my better ideas_. The damage was done, though, so no use dwelling. _Let's see what we've got to work with._ My mind ticked over, cataloguing sensations with a strange calm.

Sight didn't have much to report. I wasn't blinded – I could _see_ the darkness, I just couldn't see _through_ it. That was good, because it meant the situation wasn't necessarily permanent.

My sense of touch offered its two cents. _No metal_ , it told me. No sharp things against my skin. Just a hard body pressed to mine, a sinewy arm snugged under my chin, and another one wrapped around my chest to keep my arms on lockdown. The pressure on my throat wasn't hard enough to hurt or interfere with my breathing, just hard enough to be persuasive. I was in no immediate danger, although that didn't mean much. I couldn't see a damn thing. For all I knew, I was surrounded.

Hearing made its contribution: quiet breathing, even, calm, _much_ calmer than mine. A soft creak of leather as the grip on me shifted. A clink – a knife, maybe, but with a hollow sound, like it was sheathed. And nothing else. The sounds of the city were gone. It was as if I'd been wrapped in a bubble of silence as well as darkness, and all I could hear was what was in this bubble. That meant I was either alone with my new friend here, or he'd obscured both sight and sound of his backup.

Next, my sense of smell reported in. _Leather. Metal. Soap._ And another scent, one I knew well. _Male._

My senses assembled in the jury chamber and reached a verdict. A man was holding me, but he hadn't drawn a weapon and wasn't making any immediately threatening moves, unless you counted shrouding me in impenetrable darkness and restraining me. He wanted to talk, to intimidate. To kill…not now. Maybe not ever, if I played my cards right.

I went through my list of options. There weren't many that came to mind. I drew in a steadying breath and spoke, an edge to my voice. "Aren't you at least gonna buy me dinner, first?"

The man holding me laughed, very quietly. "No," he said. "But I do bring an offer, which I think will please you even more."

 _Not another offer_. "I'm listening." For now, at least, it was probably safest to play along.

"Good. I am glad you have decided to be civilized about this." The arm around my neck relaxed, slightly. "You have spoken to Zessyr."

I borrowed a technique from the Valen Shadowbreath school of communication. "Have I?"

A chuckle shook the chest that was pressed to my back. "No need to be play coy, _jalil_ ," the voice said, amused. "We know what was said."

That meant that they'd had someone listening in, or they'd known ahead of time what would be said. Either way, they had to be someone with close access to Zessyr. A servant, maybe. Or a Kilanatlar, of whom I'd seen at least one keeping close company with Zessyr. "Really? So why are you here?"

"We would like to propose an alternative."

My voice didn't encourage, but it didn't discourage, either. "Go on."

"Do as Zessyr bids."

"How's that an alternative?"

"Why, it is quite simple. All that we ask is that you do not interfere with what comes after."

"Which is?"

The man leaned a little closer to my ear and spoke in a whisper. " _Change_."

Chills ran down my spine. I stifled them and lifted a skeptical eyebrow. "Revolutionaries, huh?"

"Call us the whisper that can only be heard in Lolth's silence."

"Right. And what does that whisper say?"

The humor fled my captor's voice. "It says that we are not toys, and will no longer be treated as such by Lolth, or her priestesses, or by any female who tries to take their place."

"Zessyr might have something to say about that."

"We do not intend to give her the opportunity to speak."

"After hearing her talk, I can't say that I blame you."

A smile curled like smoke in my captor's voice. "Quite." The arm around my neck shifted, getting a little more comfortable. Behind me, shoulders and hips shifted, getting a little _too_ comfortable. "You must know that the Matron of the First House intends to give you to the Valsharess, along with your allies, in exchange for mercy."

"Really?" Fury rose in me. _Strange._ I wasn't scared. I should have been, but somehow all I could feel was ticked off, verging on pissed. My fingers twitched, wanting to reach for his weapon or his arm or _something_ , but I knew if I made a move it'd be me against a drow in the darkness, and that wasn't a winning proposition. If all else failed, I supposed I could always just go for a handful of his funbags and _squeeze_. That'd show him to mind his manners. "I'm flattered."

Wary surprise drove the man's voice up in register, just a touch. "Flattered?"

"Yes." I rolled my eyes down to where his arms were and blinked, forcing my vision to change. If it did, I couldn't tell. _Note to self: second sight doesn't work when I can't see. Also, crap._ "I've never had this many people want to get their hands on me this badly."

The man's chest shook with quiet laughter. "Indeed. But there will be a new First House in Lith My'athar, and it will be behind you and your allies in this war, priestess, I promise you that. All you need to do is to remove a certain obstacle, as you have been asked."

Poor My'rune Mae'vir. She'd lived this long and made it this far only to become a speedbump on somebody else's road to success. Then again, she was planning to wrap me in a big bow and hand me over to the Valsharess, so on second thought, fuck My'rune Ma'evir. "And then?"

"And then you need only step back and allow us to remove another."

 _Zessyr._ That was the obstacle – the First House of Mae'vir, in its entirety. Unless he wanted me to stand back while he murdered the Seer, in which case, he could take a flying fuck off a steep cliff. The Seer was good people, unlike these guys. "I'm not a drow," I pointed out, as if it needed any pointing out. I felt a pang at the reminder of Nathyrra's advice. She gave good advice. So why had she lied to me? "I know your word isn't binding, if you give it to a human. For all I know, every word you've said to me so far is so much rothé shit."

My captor's voice was sharp, but I got the sense its edge wasn't meant for me. " _We_ do not follow Lolth. We are willing to deal fairly with non-drow, if it serves our interests."

"And does it serve your interests to be honest with me?"

"If it gains us the city, yes." The arms holding me moved in a shrug. "After the Valsharess is defeated, you and your allies will no longer be welcome here, of course – but we are not ungrateful. We will allow you to leave this city and return to your surface without harm or hindrance."

That was nice and all, but without knowing who I was dealing with, it was all so much hot air. "I'd like to see who I'm speaking to, before I agree to anything."

The man who held me was still and silent for a long moment. Then he spoke, his voice sly. "Very well," he said, and released me.

The dark lifted. The sounds of the city came back. I turned.

The man in front of me was garbed in shadow. Shadow was his cloak and hood, and shadow was his mask. It wrapped around him like smoke – all but his eyes, which glinted cobalt blue. It took me a moment to realize that they were lenses, set in a velvet half-mask that blended almost perfectly with his blue-black skin.

The masked man looked at me, and offered me a sweeping bow. "Priestess," he said sweetly, smoothly. "Consider my offer. It will stand, until it does not. But remember – all _you_ need do is stand aside. We will take care of the rest." Then he swirled his cloak around him, and just like that, he was gone, vanishing without a sound.

I stared at the alleyway where he'd been, irritation rising like smoke. _Fucking drow and their fucking plots and their fucking melodrama._ Couldn't anyone around here be straightforward about anything? Except for Valen, of course, who would probably have broken every bone in this guy's body just for taking more than two sentences to get to the point – and if he were here, I'd have been tempted to let him go right ahead.

A door opened and closed. Footsteps ran up to me. "By Eilistraee! That was shadow magic!" Nathyrra exclaimed breathlessly. "What happened?"

A thousand conflicting feelings rose up in me at the sound of her voice, and I turned. Imloth was with her. They both looked at me with what I would have taken for concern, if I was a fool. "I…think I just got a visit from House Kilanatlar," I said. Then the dizziness hit me like a freight train, and I sagged at the knees, my vision going black around the edges.

An arm, slim but full of wiry strength, slipped around my back before I hit the ground. It was Imloth, his face worried. "What happened?" he asked. "Are you hurt?"

I blinked the blackness away, barely. I didn't think this was poison. I was starting to think that the real problem was something else entirely. "Enserric," I said. My breath came short and shallow and quick, my heart shuddering in my chest. Forget the rest – the lies, the Red Sister thing, Zessyr's matricide plot and Kilanatlar's planned double-cross of Zessyr. "Get me to Enserric."

* * *

My head started to clear even as we got closer to the temple, although my hands still shook and my heart still hammered erratically and my brains still sloshed around in my head like soup in a tureen. Imloth had to lend me his arm just so I could make it up the temple stairs, and I had to make it look like I was just leaning on him because I was too shitfaced to walk.

"Boss!" Deekin came running as we entered the vestibule. Valen was right behind him. I winced. The tiefling did not look happy, but I didn't have time to reflect on that, because the kobold was carrying my sword and my sword was yelling at me.

"You unfathomable nincompoop!" Enserric wailed as soon as I was in sight. "Pick me up right this instant!"

I lurched forward, my arm slipping from around Imloth's shoulders. My hands closed on the greatsword's hilt. A bracing cold hit me, like I'd just walked out of Drogan's barn and into one of Hilltop's limpid winter nights. All at once, I felt better – my head clearing, my hands steadying, my pulse settling, strength coming back to my limbs. I didn't even feel that drunk, anymore. Taking the sword in hand was like getting a second wind and a double shot of espresso, all at once.

Deekin peered up at me worriedly. "You okay, Boss? 'Cause snooty sword grandpa started yelling and Deekin thought maybe he had to go find you and maybe get eaten by drow after all, and now Deekin seeing you not look so bad but not look so good, either, so Deekin still kinda worried."

I stared at Enserric in dismay, only half-listening. I felt fine, only I didn't, because I hadn't been poisoned. I'd been in withdrawal. "I'm…not sure," I said weakly.

Enserric shone like a red dwarf star. He was practically spitting sparks. " _Never_ get that far from me again."

I breathed deeply, trying not to cry. Was this what it was going to be like for the rest of my life? Bound to this weapon so tightly that every step I took away from it drained a little more of my strength? "I'll try not to."

Valen brushed past Deekin and stopped in arm's reach of me. His hand half-lifted, then fell. His eyes searched my face. "Are you all right?"

My heart felt like it wanted to lose its rhythm again. I tightened my hands around Enserric and returned Valen's searching stare. His eyes were on a level with mine, thanks to the extra couple of inches of heel I was sporting, and that gave me a good view of the worried creases at their corners. That wasn't fair. I'd been all set to be angry with him for not telling me about Nathyrra, but now that he was standing there in front of me looking so fussed it was like the head of steam I'd built up on the way here had just collapsed into a little puddle and now I mostly just felt confused. "Um," I said, intelligently. "Yeah. I'm okay. Now." I looked down awkwardly, gesturing a little with Enserric. "I think I just figured out the limits of…you know."

Valen grimaced. "So I gathered. Deekin was frantic. So was Enserric. They came to find me." He relaxed a little but still gave me a once-over, as if double-checking to make sure I wasn't hiding any gaping flesh wounds. Then his face froze, except for his eyes, which got really, really big. "What…"

I waited for more, but Valen seemed to have misplaced the rest of his sentence, so I gave him a little verbal prod. "What…?"

Valen cleared his throat. Twice. "What happened to your clothes?"

I glanced down at my shiny, shiny outfit. "Oh. Yeah. That." In all the excitement, I'd almost forgotten that I was dressed more for the catwalk than the battlefield. "Imloth happened."

Valen made a couple of aborted attempts to speak before he found his voice again. "You look…"

I was starting to get a funny feeling about this. "I look…?"

The man seemed to grope for the right word. "Rich," he said at last, his voice as flat as a pancake. "You look…rich."

Whatever I'd been expecting, it hadn't been that. I put on a tone of sweetly mocking sympathy. "Is it heavy?"

Valen frowned. "Is what heavy?"

"That chip on your shoulder."

The man's expression flashed from flabbergasted to incensed so quickly it was a miracle he didn't sprain a face muscle. "I do _not_ have a-"

I cut him off. "Oh, you _so_ do."

Valen rolled his eyes. "Just because I did not grow up in a palace-"

I pointed at him triumphantly. "A- _hah_!"

A hand touched my back. "This is a very interesting discussion, but perhaps it should not be had here?" Imloth suggested brightly.

There were other drow in the nave. A few had stopped to watch, probably because it wasn't every day they saw the General of the Seer's forces bickering with a crazy human lady in evening dress. I coughed into my hand to cover a laugh. "He has a point," I observed to Valen.

The weapon master had gone military stiff all of a sudden, albeit a bit pink-eared. "Hellfire." He ran his hand over his hair and gave me a besieged look. "Why do I keep letting you drag me into these absurd arguments?"

I grinned at him. "Because I'm fun to argue with?"

His laugh was short but sweet. "You are _impossible_ to argue with."

Nathyrra looked back and forth between us like we were two crash-landed aliens from a planet where people knew how to have a good time. So, basically, not her planet. "This is wasting time," she said abruptly. She turned to Valen, all business. "We must speak to the Seer. You should hear our news, as well."

Just like that, any traces of humor on Valen's face were gone. "What happened?"

My own smile faded. It looked like Mister 'Grim and Proper' was back. "Politics happened." I looked around. We weren't private, not even remotely. I gestured with Enserric. "Let's go. We'll fill you in on the details once we're with the Seer."

He didn't argue. We trooped down the hall, or at least Valen and I trooped, the tiefling staying a couple of steps behind me as if guarding my flank from random hallway assassins. Imloth and Nathyrra padded along quietly in their eyeliner and sleek clothes, like a pair of incredibly fashion-forward panthers. Deekin trotted, mumbling to himself and rustling papers.

The guard on the Seer's door saw us coming, saluted Valen, and knocked.

From behind the door, there was a rustle, soft footsteps, and then the door opened.

The Seer stood framed in candlelight. She wore a silvery-white robe, high-necked and belted at the waist with a silver chain. She smiled at us all impartially. Then she looked at the sword in my hand, and her smile faded a little. She met my eyes, her own eyes growing troubled. "I am pleased to see you all, but it seems this is not a social call." She stood aside, opening the door wide and beckoning for us to enter. "Come, come. Please. Sit, and tell me what has happened."

I ducked through the door without waiting for a second invitation. "Thank you, Seer." I took the comfiest armchair for myself. Fuck manners. In one night, I'd been insulted, lied to, and rather disgustingly ground against, and I'd had to do it all in three inch heels. I was sitting where I wanted to sit. For good measure, I stretched my legs out in front of me and rested my booted feet on the coffee table, crossed them at the ankles, and re-arranged the drape of my mantle so I didn't accidentally give anyone a glimpse of my most holy regions.

Now that the crisis had passed, confusion and hurt came back, running through me in alternating waves. No one had told me about Nathyrra. Was it because they didn't trust me? Valen said he trusted me, and he didn't trust _anyone_ , which made me wonder why he trusted Nathyrra, whose former allegiances made her a lot more suspect than me. Maybe he hadn't known. Whether or not he knew, though, the Seer sure as hell must have. Why hadn't she said anything? Okay, it wasn't her secret to tell, but it was still one of those secrets that seemed like a really bad idea to keep, given that Nathyrra used to _work for the friggin' enemy_ – the enemy they supposedly needed my help to beat. Why had they kept it secret from me?

While I brooded, everyone else sorted themselves out. Deekin crouched near my chair, sorting his papers and fussing over his quill. Imloth took up an entire sofa with his elegant sprawl, and Nathyrra took the other. Valen stood at attention near the door, vigilant as ever. The Seer distributed teacups to everyone, finally pressing one into my hand and gently closing my fingers around it before taking her own seat next to Nathyrra. "Now," she said. "What news?"

All expression fled Nathyrra's face. "Zessyr Mae'vir has made us an offer of alliance. She claims that her mother, My'rune, is wavering and will betray us to the Valsharess."

The Seer closed her eyes briefly. Her face was unlined and satin-smooth, but for a moment, it looked old, as if all the weight of uncountable years and untold weariness was suddenly dragging it down. "She asked you to kill her mother." It was a statement, not a question.

Nathyrra's face was like a statue's, but in her lap, her fingers clenched. "Yes."

The Seer exhaled shakily and bowed her head. "Eilistraee forgive my people, for they know not what they do."

Valen spoke up, grim as an undertaker. "They know, Seer. They simply do not care."

The Seer's musical voice held the notes of a lament. "Why would they, when they have been taught all of their lives that trust is foolish, love is death, and power is all?"

I frowned down the length of my legs, studying the toes of my boots. _Do I trust these guys enough to get involved?_ Nathyrra and Imloth I was no longer so sure about. The Seer…every instinct told me that she was a good person, and she'd have to be a damn good liar to fool my instincts this thoroughly. Valen…at the thought of him, my eyes sought out Valen's face, so reflexively that I hadn't realized where they were going until they were already there. _Do I trust_ _ **him**_ _?_ He seemed to feel my eyes on him, and the grim lines of his face eased for a moment as he met my eyes and offered me a quick smile. I returned it briefly before recovering myself and returning my stare to my boots. No – there was no doubt that I could trust Valen on this. The very idea of him being party to any kind of drow plot beggared the imagination. He was too hot-headed. Too honest. He had a great poker face, but he couldn't tell a direct lie to save his life. And maybe he was being duped by his drow companions, but even if he was, if I didn't share my intel, he might be in danger, along with me and everyone on the surface. I bit back a sigh and raised my voice. "There's more," I chimed in grimly. "House Kilanatlar contacted me after we spoke to Zessyr. At least, I think it was House Kilanatlar – it sounded like them, and the guy who talked to me used some kind of shadow magic."

The Seer was silent for a moment. Then she took a breath and turned to me. "Very well. What did they wish of you?"

From the resignation in her voice, I had a feeling she knew the answer, but maybe she just needed to hear it out loud. "He wants us to go ahead and remove what they called Zessyr's 'obstacle' for her. We're just supposed to stand aside afterwards and let them remove an obstacle of their own."

Valen frowned at the floor. "Zessyr?"

"Probably," I said with a shrug. "He said we'd have a new First House behind us if we helped them, and I don't think he meant a new and improved Mae'vir." I turned back to the Seer. "He said they'd let us leave the city after the war was over. 'Unharmed and unhindered' were his exact words, I think. I believe him about as far as I can throw him, but I believe just about everyone in this town as far as I can throw them." Deliberately, I avoided looking at Nathyrra. "And I'm willing to believe that Kilanatlar sees a power vacuum opening up and wants to step into it."

The Seer nodded and looked down again. "I see." Then she raised her cup to her lips and took a sip of tea. When she lowered it, her voice was calmer. "Well. That is…all that I had feared, but nothing I did not expect, I suppose."

I goggled at her. "You expected this?"

"You have won us a golem army and given us a way to track the Valsharess's movements from afar," the Seer replied. "Our position has been strengthened, and our value as allies, increased. It was inevitable that we would be drawn into the city's intrigues."

My blood ran cold. "So Lith My'athar's taking us more seriously."

The Seer sighed. "I am afraid that they are."

I could see why she was afraid. Getting drawn into drow politics was a high-risk, high-reward proposition, and I wasn't even sure about the reward part.

Nathyrra spoke up without looking at me. "This male you say was of Kilanatlar. What did he look like?"

I hesitated. I didn't really feel like talking to her, but this was bigger than either of us. "I couldn't see much." The admission rankled. I was the only person in this room who _couldn't_ see in the dark. "It was like he was… _wearing_ shadows, almost. I couldn't see his body, and only half of his face. He had a mask…" I drew a finger across the apples of my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. "…like this." I frowned, remembering. "There was one thing that stood out, though. The mask had blue lenses for eyes."

Nathyrra sucked in a surprised breath. "A follower of Vhaeraun."

Imloth was nodding, his face pensive. "Yes."

Deekin looked up. "Vhae-who?"

Nathyrra barely glanced down at him. Her mind seemed to be somewhere else entirely. "Vhaeraun," she explained shortly. "The god of thievery, shadows, trade, those who wish to reclaim our lands on the surface, and…" She trailed off, glancing at Imloth, and finally an emotion broke through her mask. It looked like embarrassment. "And males. Vhaeraun believes that males and females have equal value, and Lolth's ways only cripple our true potential."

Deekin cocked his head in a way which made him look kind of like a big, featherless sparrow. "Doesn't everybody? Everybody who not be crazy, anyway."

"This is the Underdark, and these are the drow," Valen muttered. "If it was sanity you wanted, you are looking in the wrong place."

The ex-assassin's words rang a bell in my head. "The guy did say something about not following Lolth," I mused. "He had some pretty revolutionary talk. Something about not being toys anymore."

Nathyrra nodded coolly. "Yes. Your assessment may even be correct: Kilanatlar is seeking to take advantage of Mae'vir's weakness and Lolth's absence to overthrow the First House and perhaps even eliminate Lolth's priestesshood in the city." She pursed her lips. "Ambitious, if foolish."

I hated to ask, but I felt like I was going to have to. "Why foolish? With Lolth gone…" I couldn't finish the sentence. It took me a few seconds to pinpoint why. Lolth had vanished. Valen had said he'd seen gods die. Shaundakul had come close to dying, when Myth Drannor fell. If it could happen once, it could happen again, and if it did, I'd be a bereft and bleeding thing, alone down to the bones of my soul. Whatever else I was, I was one of Shaundakul's. I didn't think I knew how to be anything else.

That little epiphany hit me with the force of a lightning bolt. I felt metal bite into my palm and realized that I was gripping my holy symbol like a life line. _Don't die on me, old man,_ I prayed. _Don't go anywhere I can't follow._ The amulet grew perceptibly warmer under my hand, as soothing as a sunbeam. I breathed a little easier, but still didn't let go.

Nathyrra was talking. "…they have command of the city," came the tail end of her reply. The rest, I'd missed in the midst of my little emotional crisis, but her next statement helped fill in the blanks. "All the Matrons of all the Houses, great and small, are priestesses, and even if their prayers go unanswered, they still have all the resources of their Houses at their disposal. To destroy them would not only be difficult, but would effectively destroy the city."

Valen was scowling deeply at nothing and nobody in particular. "All we have is the word of a presumed Kilanatlar and a spurned daughter to tell us My'rune Mae'vir is wavering. How do we know that they are not lying about that?"

"We don't," I replied. Old, rust-encrusted neurons were flickering back to life, telling me how to read the currents of power. "But it makes sense for them to act against her now, either way. In peacetime, it's hard to upset the status quo, but in wartime, everything's up for grabs. Anyone with enough guts could seize power now, and if they play their cards right, they might even be able to keep it. People like to follow the winner."

Valen frowned in thought. "You are saying that in a leaderless time, anyone who steps up will find everyone else falling in behind them."

"Well, within reason," I hedged. "I doubt Lith My'athar's going to fall in behind an outsider like the Seer, once there's no longer the threat of the Valsharess to keep them in line." I nodded at the Seer. "No offense."

She smiled at me. "None taken. Though I do hold out the hope that many will come to the light of Eilistraee, at the end of this war."

 _Whatever helps you sleep at night._ Me, I was just hoping I got out of this alive and in one piece. "Maybe they will," I said, because that wasn't an argument to have right now. "But either way, if we win this war with My'rune at the helm of Mae'vir, people will line up behind her, and that's it for Zessyr, because if she couldn't remove her mother when My'rune was vulnerable she won't be able to do it when My'rune has everybody on her side. If the Valsharess wins…" I trailed off, and had to swallow hard before going on. "I doubt she'll go easy on the losers."

Nathyrra spoke up. "She will not." He voice was bleak. "Those who led the rebellion against her will be purged. It is what she has done with each city she has taken."

"She spared _you_ ," I pointed out – pointedly.

"She killed every member of my House and made every effort to kill me. I only survived due to luck and skill, and even then, it took the loss of eight of her best assassins to persuade her that perhaps I was worth sparing." Nathyrra's eyes were cold, disdainful. "Zessyr, on the other hand, is weak. Undisciplined. Complacent. Were she not, she would have killed her mother long ago. The Valsharess will not extend the same offer to her."

That was a bone-chilling way to look at it. "So Zessyr's days are numbered."

Nathyrra nodded. "As are My'rune's. The Valsharess will eliminate them, and make their suffering public, so that all know the price of disobedience." The ex-assassin went through her points of analysis methodically, emotionlessly, like she was ticking off points on a list. "After, she will install a puppet House. One she believes she can control. Kilanatlar, most likely, as they are next in line after Mae'vir."

I thought back to the fervent way the shadow-masked man had spoken. "Kilanatlar hates her." They didn't seem fond of women in general. Now that I thought about it, the way that masked drow had ground against me really hadn't been about flirtation at all. Neither had the sly looks Chaz had shot me. It had been about a near-pathological need to push the boundaries of what they were allowed to get away with - to push back against the power the women here had over them. As a woman, I'd just been someone else who needed to be pushed. I supposed I couldn't blame them. I'd push, too, if I had to live in a society where my only options in life were to be a sex toy, brood stock, or cannon fodder. "Will they really fall in line?"

Frost almost crackled in Nathyrra's voice. "They will serve her, if the alternative is their annihilation." She shrugged. "Besides, they are patient and cunning. Perhaps, in time, they may be able to lure her into complacence and bring her down – but they cannot do that if they are dead."

I thought I'd been doing pretty good sussing this stuff out, but next to Nathyrra, I felt like a flunky holding the coat of a master. My ego deflated, hitting my temper on the way down. "Kilanatlar will have opposed her, too, though," I tried to argue. "Why would she leave them alive, especially if they're likely to plot against her?"

"Because they acted as Second House, obedient to the First House," Nathyrra countered with damnable calm. "That is forgivable – and at a certain point, to get what she wants, she must forgive. If the Valsharess were to purge all those who allied with Mae'vir against her, there would be no city left, and this city is too valuable an asset for her to destroy. She must make object lessons of the leaders of the rebellion, but she cannot rule over an empire of corpses."

That made a terrible kind of sense. "Of course," I said glumly. "The only thing that costs more than a war is an occupation. If the Valsharess wants to rule the world, she needs resources. Money." My voice darkened. "Troops, to feed her war machine."

"Quite." Nathyrra frowned pensively. "But we cannot be certain that Zessyr and Kilanatlar are not using My'rune's alleged defection as a ruse to draw us out. If we are not careful, we may sneak into the Mae'vir fortress only to find My'rune and her army waiting for us." Her voice became grim. "And I think we must discover the truth – before the Valsharess is at our gates and we discover it the hard way."

The Seer sighed. "Yes, but how? This place is full of secrets so dark even my sight cannot penetrate them."

"I do not know." Nathyrra tapped her finger to her lips. "House Vharzyym may know something. Their spy network is the best in the city."

I thought of the lady in green and gold, with her parrot. "There was a Vharzyym in the tavern tonight, I think."

Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did Nathyrra display surprise. "Yes. I saw her. I think we can rest assured that nothing which occurred therein went unnoticed by Alulove Vharzyym's little spiders in the garden."

The Seer nodded slowly. "Then we must make contact with them. Vharzyym thrives on trade with the surface. They will not relish the idea of being pressed into war with it."

Nathyrra's voice was as calm as an Eldathan pond. "No need. If previous experience is anything to go by, when Vharzyym is ready, they will contact us."

I slumped back in my chair. "Oh, _goodie_. More flowers."

Valen's face betrayed a similar lack of enthusiasm. "I hate this," he muttered.

I looked at him. The poor man looked like he was ready to start bashing drow heads together, just on general principle. "Hate what?"

Valen's hand cut through the air in a sweeping swat, as if he wanted to just bat all of this bullshit away. "These _games_. Give me an honest fight with a clear enemy any day. That, I know how to handle. This…" He trailed off with an annoyed huff of breath. "I do not even know where to begin."

Imloth laughed. "You do not have the patience for this, _abbil_ ," he told Valen. "Nor do I. But do not worry. These games are not for the likes of us." Languidly, he gestured at Nathyrra and I. "They are for the noble daughters, who are taught from birth to play them."

I gave Valen a long look. "Still wanna trade?"

He returned my look, with interest. "I would like to see _you_ try to find a stretch of gutter in the Hive where you can kip for the night without getting rained on," he answered pointedly. "Or pissed on. Or robbed blind. Or cut into very small pieces and sold as a meat pie two days later and three streets over."

"Oh, that last one be easy," Deekin piped up, helpful as ever. "Nobody gonna turn Boss into a pie. She be too skinny. There not be much eating on her."

Valen looked at me. His face reddened. "There is enough," he muttered, looking away. "If half-grown, underfed tieflings are tasty morsels by Hiver standards, she will be, too."

I could see why his face might be red. He'd just admitted to a pretty embarrassing truth, namely that he'd had to spend at least a few nights in his life sleeping on the street, dodging Sweeney Todd and surprise golden showers. No wonder he'd survived Hell – life in the Hive had almost been a practice run.

Nathyrra cleared her throat. "There is another thing."

The Seer turned her attention to Nathyrra. "What is that, dear?"

"Zessyr wore a ring," Nathyrra answered. "It looked like Ischarri handiwork. I believe Ischarri is backing Zessyr, or would at least like her to believe as much."

I hadn't even come close to making that connection. To me, it had just been an ugly-ass ring, although in hindsight it _had_ kind of looked like that map-sphere-thingamajig, with all the complicated gold filigree. "So…wait," I said, fumbling towards comprehension. "That map I got. With the roses. It came from Vharzyym and Ischarri."

Nathyrra nodded briefly, staring straight ahead. "Yes."

"Doesn't Vharzyym usually support Kilanatlar?"

Another sparing nod. "Yes."

I frowned. Was she angry at me? _Like hell._ I wasn't the one who'd been keeping secrets. Not important ones, anyway. Nothing that would make a difference to anyone. "Fine," I said shortly. "So we have Kilanatlar, Vharzyym, and Ischarri working together?"

Nathyrra shrugged. "Perhaps. Or perhaps there are two separate but tangential alliances here – Kilanatlar and Vharzyym, and Vharzyym and Ischarri. To what ends, I do not know. Certainly, if Mae'vir falls and the new First House has Ischarri to thank for helping in Mae'vir's defeat, Ischarri can only benefit."

"Makes sense," I mused. Except I didn't know what 'tangential' meant, but I thought I got the gist. "Kilanatlar probably isn't willing to move against My'rune without backup. They have Vharzyym. Might be helpful if they had Ischarri, too." I thought a little more. "Plus, having an alliance with the two Houses with the most surface contacts would open up a whole new market for Ischarri's magical, uh…thingies."

Nathyrra frowned in thought. "True, although it is not clear whether that map was given to you with Kilanatlar's knowledge, or without it."

"Kilanatlar has shadow magic," I pointed out. "They could have been the ones who snuck it in."

"Or Vharzyym and Ischarri are working together for reasons of their own, independent of any agreement with Kilanatlar," Nathyrra countered. "Among the drow, there are always secret alliances, and we ignore those at our peril."

I stared into space, trying to make sense of all this. Then I cradled my forehead in my hands. "My head hurts."

A glum voice came from around knee-level. "So does Deekin's."

Imloth stared into his tea as if wishing his teacup held something higher proof. "So does Imloth's." He looked up. "What do we do?"

Nathyrra went all blank and distant again, as if the greater part of her had stepped away, leaving only a shell behind. "You will do nothing," she stated. "I will do as I must."

Imloth jerked out of his usual indolent slouch, almost dousing himself in tea. "What is this, now?"

Nathyrra spoke in a monotone. "This task was asked of me, not of you, and I…" Her voice faltered a little, then firmed again. "I would ask none of you to do it in my stead."

The words leapt off of my tongue before I could stop them, pushed by some up-welling of anger. "Because what an assassination really needs is that personal touch?" I demanded.

Nathyra stiffened. Her dark eyes got darker. "Because my soul is stained with so much blood, what difference will another drop make?" she asked tightly. She shot me a blistering glance and sniffed. "Besides, I have the skills to do this. You do not."

Before I could find a retort, the Seer spoke. "No," she said.

Nathyrra blinked, frowned, and turned, her posture softening in confusion. "Seer?"

The Seer shook her head. "No," she said again, and her voice was as smooth and unyielding as glass. "I am sorry, Nathyrra, but I cannot sanction this." She took the former assassin's hands in hers, her voice becoming gentler again. "Eilistraee forgives all, but I do not think you will forgive yourself if you do this, and I will not stand by and watch your soul bleed to death from a thousand cuts, _dalharil_."

Nathyrra sucked in a breath. "If My'rune betrays us to the Valsharess-"

The Seer just smiled. "We must have faith that she will not."

Nathyrra hesitated. "But if she does?"

"Then we shall bring all of our might to bear against her," the Seer answered with uncharacteristic heat. Her midnight gaze had its own gravity, the gravity that came of seeing all too many years pass in front of them, with each year adding its own drag on her soul. "But we will not do murder in the dark. That is not Eilistraee's way. That is not _our_ way."

Nathyrra tried to protest. "Seer-"

The Seer's voice firmed. "Enough. I did not choose to become the leader of an army, but Eilistraee demands it of me, and now, as your leader, I must demand this of you."

Nathyrra hesitated. Then, with clear reluctance, she bowed her head. "Yes, Mother Seer."

"Good." The Seer squeezed the younger woman's hand. "First things first, we must understand the situation. I will rely on you to fetter out further information, and I…" Her eyes went to a flat object on her tea table, draped in a spidersilk sheet. She didn't look too enthused about the prospect of touching that mirror again, but then she squared her shoulders and shook it off. "I will see what I can see."

Nathyrra nodded thoughtfully. "I will try to find out more about My'rune Mae'vir's plans. If her exiled daughter knows of them, surely someone else does. Some careful listening may reveal more."

Imloth spoke up. "I will be helping Ossyr train his forces on the catapults, soon. I will listen to what he and the others say." He flashed a cutting smile. "Sometimes nobles say things in front of common soldiers that they will not say in front of their own kind, because they believe we are too stupid or too unimportant to be a concern to them."

The Seer inclined her head. "Very well. Be careful, both of you."

"Of course," Nathyrra answered smoothly. Her eyes were already distant, pensive, calculating.

Imloth gave the Seer a vaguely affronted stare. "I am always careful."

The worried expression on the Seer's face was a pretty good indication that she wasn't so sure Imloth knew what 'careful' meant, much less how to be it. "Very well." She took a breath and turned to me. "And you?"

I was tempted to give Kilanatlar the go-ahead – they didn't seem half so bad as Zessyr, and after seeing the way men were treated around here, I thought that maybe this place was ripe for a little revolution. I wasn't about to jump into this little plot on my own, though, so for now… "I guess I'll be in Zorvak'mur." If I said it fast, it wasn't quite so terrifying. "Negotiating."

Valen looked at me. "Not alone," he told me firmly. "I will be with you."

Some tension in my shoulders unwound, although I wasn't sure why. Valen was an even worse negotiator than I was. "Good."

The Seer nodded and rose. "Then, if there is nothing more, I think it would be best if we were all to go to our rest."

 _Guess that's a wrap_. I stood, but before I could get anywhere, I found Imloth's arm draped around my shoulders. "A word, priestess?" he murmured in my ear.

The drow's arm on my shoulders was very companionable and friendly, but also very strongly urging me towards the door. "Uh. Do I have a choice?" I asked.

Imloth beamed at me. "No, no really," he said, and steered me out, waving over his shoulder at the others.

I tried to crane my neck to figure out what Deekin was doing and say goodnight to Valen, but Imloth seemed to be on a mission, and he steered me down the halls to the library, gently shoved me over the threshold, followed me inside, closed the door, and gestured at a chair. "Sit," he ordered. He wasn't smiling. "We will speak."

I'd never seen the happy-go-lucky Imloth this…not happy. Or go. Or lucky. I sat, too shocked to argue.

Imloth pulled up a second chair and arrayed himself in it with that unconsciously sensual grace of his. "You are angry with Nathyrra," he stated.

My molars ground together a little. "Yes.

He nodded, as if it was what he expected to hear. "Why?"

I stared at him. "What do you mean, _why_?" I remembered the red woman in the moonlight, and the awful expectation that I was about to find out what it felt like to have my throat laid open and to drown in my own blood. My hand rose to cover my neck. "She used to be a Red Sister."

Imloth shrugged. "But she is one no longer, and that is all any of us need know." He pinned me with a penetrating, silver-pale stare. "Besides, she told me that you knew she was once an assassin. This did not upset you?"

I hemmed and hawed a little, trying to put my confusing jumble of feelings into words. "It did at first, but…" Words failed me.

Imloth arched an eyebrow. "But?"

Now that I thought about it, I wasn't really sure why it had stopped bothering me. "I…I guess figured it didn't make a difference, since she isn't doing it now." And she'd seemed nice, despite her reserve, and I'd badly needed some more friends down here, so I'd chosen to ignore it.

Imloth gave me a long look of near-fatherly censure. "Nor is she a Red Sister," he pointed out. "Now."

I squirmed. "That's different."

Imloth kept gently, relentlessly prying. "Different? How?" He leaned his chin on his hand and studied me. "Is it that she once served our enemy? Is that what troubles you?

I spasmed. "It troubles me because it's personal!" I burst out. "She didn't work for just anybody! She didn't kill just anybody! She worked for the woman who wants _me_ dead!" My own words reached my ears, giving me the chance to actually hear what I'd just said. I stopped, my jaw hanging. My heart sank. "Aaaaand I'm kind of an asshole, aren't I?"

Imloth looked at me, and softly, ruefully, he laughed. "As are we all."

I bent forward, burying my face in my free hand. It felt hot. I hated these moments of self-realization. They never showed me anything nice. "You're not an asshole," I mumbled into my fingers.

"No?" Imloth asked, and laughed again. "I was once patron of a noble House." The chair creaked as he leaned back, sighing. "I did many terrible things to take and defend my position, not because it was necessary, but because it made me feel good." His voice turned subdued. "It made me feel safe."

I lifted my face out of my hands, a little. "You?"

Imloth smiled. "I." He looked at me thoughtfully. "Eilistraee forgives all, priestess. She must. Do you know why?"

I rubbed my hand over my face. It still felt red. "No. Why?"

Imloth's voice was sad. "Because for those of us who were not born in her light, there is much to forgive."

I stared down at the floor through my fingers. "Why didn't Nathyrra just _tell_ me?"

Silk rustled – a shrug, maybe. "Perhaps she was afraid." Imloth paused, then spoke again, more carefully. "Having seen your response when you found her secret, perhaps she was right to fear."

He had a point. _I am such a jackass._ Sighing deeply, I sat up. "What made Nathyrra decide to leave the Red Sisters?" I asked, my voice subdued.

Imloth spread his hands. "She came to Eilistraee. Beyond that, it is not for me to tell." He paused again, a muscle twitching in his cheek. "But…I can tell you why I left the Underdark. If it would help."

I looked at him. He didn't have the look of someone who was about to tell a happy story. "That's up to you," I said. "I don't have a right to ask." _I've done enough damage for one day._

Imloth looked down briefly. "No. But it is my right to tell you, and perhaps it may help you understand." Blowing out a breath, he stood up, looking around. "This needs something…"

I watched his eyes search the room. "Something?"

He frowned, then held up a finger. "I will return. Wait." Then he slipped out of the room. I waited, leaning Enserric against my chair in the meantime so he was out of my hand but in easy reach. I didn't faint right away, which I decided to consider a good sign. A few minutes later, Imloth came back with a bulbous black bottle and one goblet. He poured something reddish and sweet-smelling into the goblet. Then he handed the goblet to me. For himself, he took a hefty swig straight out of the bottle. "Ahh," he said, when he was done. "Better."

I took a sniff of the stuff in my glass, then a taste. It tasted like dark berries and hot spices, was about as salty as it was sweet, and the alcohol fumes coming off of it hit my sinuses like a kick from an angry mule. "Wow." I eyed the bottle. "You sure you want to drink that?"

Imloth hefted his bottle by the neck, downed another mouthful, and pointed at me with the hand still holding the bottle. "Yes," he said, and dropped into his chair again. Liquor sloshed, threatening to stain his silks. "Very." He settled more comfortably. "Now. Where was I?"

I looked at the fat black bottle in his slim black hand. "Getting shi….I mean, getting really drunk?"

Imloth waved the bottle negligently. "Aside from that." He took another pensive swig, then nodded as if in remembrance. "Ah. Yes. How I left the Underdark." He balanced the bottle on his knee, one hand still wrapped around its neck. "As I said, I was patron to a noble House. Do you know what that means?"

I frowned, shrugged, and leaned back, taking a sip of my own whatever-it-was. It was warming, which was nice, down here in the chilly dark. "You were a Matron's, uh..."

"Toy," Imloth finished for me. "Yes." He looked at me and smiled faintly. "Your face says you think this is bad, but it was not all bad. I lived in comfort and as long as I pleased Zilvra – my Matron – it pleased her to indulge me." He looked at the bottle. "Pleasing her was not always…easy, it is true. And sometimes what pleased her most was to be cruel." He took another deep draw from his bottle before going on. "But she liked me enough to keep me, and kept me long enough to have a daughter." His eyes went distant. "Zilvra did not say that she was mine, but I knew. She had my eyes." He swallowed. "And my weakness."

My heart went soft around the edges. "Nobody in their right mind would call you weak, Imloth," I said gently.

The drow shook his head. "There, with all respect, you are wrong," he countered. His jaw tightened. "I allowed Zilvra to keep our daughter from me, because I was only a male, and I knew that if I defied my Matron in this, she would give me one last kiss and then offer my heart to Lolth, and what good would I be to my daughter then?"

A hollow feeling rose in my throat. "Couldn't you see your daughter at all?"

Imloth's head moved in a slight nod. "I saw her, yes. Zilvra let me look on her when she was born." His lips twisted in a smile as fond as it was bitter. "That was also how I knew she was mine. Only the sire of a noble daughter may look on her then, and then only if her mother allows it – which is rare. A cruel gift from my cruel lady." His face softened. "And when my little _belaern_ , my little treasure, was very young, I was able to steal a moment with her, here and there." This time, his smile was wistful and full of love. "I made her laugh. She had such a beautiful laugh." Then he blinked, as if coming back to earth from wherever happy place his mind had gone, and the lines of his face went taut again. He took another drink. "But soon came the time for her to be taught the ways of Lolth. As master of weapons, I was allowed to teach her to fight, but…" He shook his head. "No more talking. No more laughing."

I clasped my fingers around my glass, not wanting to ask but knowing I had to. He'd come this far, and dredged the undisturbed depths of his heart because he thought I should hear this. I owed it to him to see this dredging through to the end, no matter what horrors surfaced. "What happened?"

Imloth took a long drink out of his bottle before answering. "I watched my daughter forget how to laugh, and did nothing, because I was afraid and did not know what to do," he said flatly. "I watched her soul die in Lolth's grasp, and I did nothing, because how do you fight a goddess?" His chest rose and fell in a deep sigh. "Then I watched her die with her sister's knife in her heart, and still I did nothing, because after years of doing nothing, there was nothing more to be done." He stared at nothing for a while. Then, all at once, he sucked in a deep, desperate breath, like a drowning man, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "There," he said roughly. "Now you know my sins. Do you hate me?"

 _Strange._ I'd never really considered that a drow might be able to cry, but now that I saw it, it seemed only natural. "No," I answered. "I don't." I tried to think of what to do. Then I thought of what the Seer might do, and I set my glass aside, leaned forward, and, very carefully, as if I was scooping up a baby bird, took his hand in both of mine. He didn't resist, which I took as a sign that he was either okay with the gesture or he was beyond caring either way. "I'm sorry about your daughter," I said quietly. I couldn't fathom what it felt like to watch my own child die - I was nobody's mother and had no plans to change that, much less had spared any thought as to what it might feel like to have a child and lose them - but then I thought of the terror I'd seen in Dad's eyes when I'd come home with a bullet hole in me, terror so deep and wide I'd have done anything to ease it, and thought I could glimpse Imloth's pain in that terror's reflection. "I'm sorry you both had to go through that."

Imloth blinked rapidly. Another tear escaped, contributing to the further ruin of his eye makeup. He didn't seem to notice it. "So am I." He looked down and took another drink. "It was then that I left. I had no more reason to stay, and the surface held no more fear for me. Why should it? My greatest fear had already come true, and all others seemed small compared to it." Remorse hollowed out his face, made it look gaunt. "I should have left sooner, and taken my daughter with me, but the life of a _shebali,_ a houseless rogue, always one step away from death…that is no life at aIl."

I tried to understand. "You thought she'd be safer as a…" I tried to think of a _drow_ way to put it. "As a noble?"

Imloth nodded. "Yes. Not safe, never safe where Lolth reigns, but the House is life, and even a weak House better than no House." He shrugged. "The only other hope was to go to the surface, but how, and where, and how would we survive once there? I knew nothing of your world and feared what I did not know."

I nodded. "It's hard to leave the world you know for one you don't."

Imloth studied me with new thoughtfulness, or tried to. His eyes seemed a little unfocused. "Yes. It must be difficult for you. The Underdark is very different from the surface."

That strange new habit of truth seized my tongue again. "Not just the Underdark."

Imloth blinked owlishly and tilted his head. "Explain?"

My tongue darted out to wet my suddenly dry lips. _I can't fucking believe I'm doing this_. With any luck, though, he'd be so drunk he wouldn't remember any of this tomorrow. "If I tell you, you can't tell anyone else," I warned. "Except…except Valen and Deekin. They know."

Imloth's eyes had brightened with intrigue. He pressed his fist to his heart, or at least his bottle to his heart. "I swear I will not."

I fought with myself. _I can't believe I'm trusting a drow._ But he was a drow who'd just opened up his own bag of bones and dumped them at my feet, and I was having a hard time maintaining my mistrust in the face of his tears. He couldn't be _that_ good a liar. Besides, I wouldn't give him any details, and what harm was there in that? I took a deep breath and leaned forward. "I'm not from this world," I said, lowering my voice to where my human ears could barely hear it but Imloth, with his elven hearing, probably could. Xanos and his damnably sharp ears had taught me that little trick. "Came here by portal a few years ago."

Imloth stared at me, a slightly tipsy light of wonder dawning in his eyes. "You are like Valen?"

I flushed. "Not quite." I hadn't seen half the places he'd seen, although if I had my way I'd drag as many stories of those places out of him as I could. As long as they weren't in the Abyss – Valen didn't need reminding of _that_. "But close enough, I guess."

Imloth straightened, his eyes widening. He pointed his bottle at me. "That is why you were all that time talking, and how you made him forget Ossyr!" He grinned happily at his discovery. "You were talking about your worlds."

I was pretty sure I hadn't made Valen forget anything he hadn't wanted to forget, but whatever. "Yeah."

Imloth giggled into his bottle. "Well done. It is very hard to make him talk so much." He rolled his eyes. "I know. I have tried."

I smiled. "You must be doing okay," I observed. "He seems to like you." Valen was as prickly as a cactus. Only affection could explain why he put up with Imloth's teasing.

Imloth shrugged and smiled winsomely and twirled his hair around his finger. "Of course he likes me. Everyone likes me. I am very charming." He paused, then added, "Unless they meet me in battle. Then they are not charmed, but they are dead, so it does not matter so much." His smile faded. "But the General was very hard to charm, even for me. When he first came to us, he was alone, and made himself more alone. He spoke to none but the Seer."

My heart twisted a little. _Damn it, Valen._ "Why'd he do that to himself?"

Imloth frowned in thought. "I think he was afraid."

That made no sense. "Afraid? Of you?"

Imloth shook his head. "No. Of himself."

Valen had said he wasn't in his right mind, back when he first found the Seer. "This was when he chased you up a tree, wasn't it?"

At that, Imloth chuckled. "Not long after." He gestured with his bottle, as if pointing to some distant figure. "But I saw how alone he was, and I thought, this is not right, so I went and I talked to him."

I tried to imagine Valen's reaction to having some random drow invade his space and blabber at him. "That must have annoyed the Hells out of him."

Imloth wrinkled his forehead in confusion. Briefly, he consulted his bottle as if it might clarify his understanding. From the look on his face, it hadn't. "No, the Hells are still there," he corrected me.

 _Shaundakul save me from literalists_. "No, what I meant is, didn't that make him angry?"

Imloth chuckled. "Oh, yes, but I once shared a Matron Mother's bed. To speak to an angry tiefling?" He flapped his hand drunkenly. " _Pffft_. That is nothing." His grin was full of mischief. "So, I talked, and soon he understood I would only stop talking if he killed me."

I'd have paid good money to see the look on Valen's face when he reached _that_ conclusion. "Did he talk to you then?"

Imloth smirked. "No. He sulked and threatened to behead me." He shrugged. "But he did not actually behead me, so I kept talking until he gave up and talked back." The drow smiled in smug satisfaction. "Then he was not so alone."

I chuckled. "And you call yourself a coward?"

Melancholy snuck back over Imloth's face, stealing his laughter again. "You do not understand," he insisted. "I _am_ a coward. Not in battle, no, but in my heart. It is easy for me to do what is easy, what pleases me. To do what is right but not easy…that is different." He wiped his eyes. "That is why I had to speak to him. My weakness killed my Triel. I had to be strong and do what was not easy, or else, if I ever had another daughter, Lolth might take her, too." He toyed with his bottle, and took a last, deep draught from it. "But," he said then, gesturing a little sloppily. " _But_ , if I ever have another daughter, I will make sure she is born in Eilistraee's light, and I will let no one take her from me, and I will make sure she never forgets how to laugh."

"Triel?" I tested the foreign sound on my tongue, trying not to stumble over it too badly. "That was her name?"

Imloth's smile was as pained as it was peaceful. "Yes."

I squeezed his hand. "Pretty name."

The drow returned my squeeze. "Thank you."

We sat in silence for a while, the drow and I, me hunched over with my hands holding his and him enjoying the last of his hooch. It wasn't until Imloth was upending his bottle and peering up its neck to see if there was anything left that I spoke again. "Is that what it was like for Nathyrra? Did she grow up like that?"

Imloth sighed and dropped his bottle. It thumped to the carpet. "Yes and no," he answered. "Nathyrra survived where my Triel did not, but at great cost." He slumped back, pulling his hand from mine so he could rub his face and incidentally smear his eyeshadow, thus completing his metamorphosis from an inverse-color Ziggy Stardust to Marilyn Manson on a cocaine bender. "Lolth destroys all that is good in us, priestess," he told me, his voice slurring slightly. "She makes us forget how to laugh and how to trust, and none more so than her favored females. From them, she demands perfection or death." He heaved a sigh. "None of us who were born in Lolth's grasp escape without having done things…we should not have done. Eilistraee knows this. She forgives us, even when we do not forgive ourselves."

I stared at the floor between my feet. "Eilistraee's a lot nicer than me," I mumbled.

Imloth laughed unsteadily. "Than all of us." He sighed. "Now, Nathyrra tries to learn what are trust and friendship and all of those things she was forbidden to learn, but it is hard, priestess. I do not think anyone who is not drow can understand how hard it is, and how frightening."

Silence settled over us. I was too depressed to talk, and Imloth was too pickled.

Silk rustled, heralding movement from the other chair. I looked up to see Imloth raise his finger and stare at it for a second, going slightly cross-eyed in the process. Then he slurred something in drowish.

I squinted at him. That had gone by _way_ too fast for me to understand any of it. "Say what?"

Imloth looked at me, or tried to. He seemed to be seeing a few of me and couldn't quite decide which one to look at. " _Usstan tlu shee'lot_ ," he repeated, very slowly, the way you would to a child or to someone suffering from a head injury.

His words stumbled through the apartment building of my brain, searching for a doorway marked 'translation', but this being _my_ brain, the words just stumbled blindly through an exit door and fell off the fire escape. "Uh. Okay. What's that mean?"

The drow blinked a few times. Then he braced both arms on the arms of his chair and tried to stand. He failed. "It means that I am drunk," he translated for me. He tried to get up again. " _Vith_. Why do my legs not work?"

I hid a grin. "I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's probably because you just drank an entire bottle of hooch."

Imloth stared at me owlishly. "Hooch? What a silly word." He giggled a little and repeated the word to himself. "Hooch. _Hooooch_."

I stared at him, then sighed and stood. The man was lucky I had so much experience dealing with drunk people. "All right, I think it's beddy time for Imloth." I held out my hands. "Come on. Up we get."

Imloth nodded so hard he almost socked himself in the jaw with his own collarbone. "Yes. An excellent idea." He grabbed my hand and pulled himself up, damn near taking both of us down in the process. Then he wove in the general direction of the door, dragging me behind him like an afterthought. After a few steps, he reeled to a stop and squinted. "What a strange door," he remarked. He patted the wall, searching. "Where is the handle?"

 _Hoo boy._ I took the drow by the shoulders. "That's the wall, sweetie," I said. "You can tell, because walls don't have handles." Gently, I steered him about two feet to the left. " _That's_ the door. See?"

Imloth stared at the door, then grinned happily. "What a helpful female you are," he burbled, and opened the door on the third try.

I tightened my grip on his shoulders before he'd gone too far. "Let's go for a walk, why don't we?" I suggested brightly. I wasn't pouring this one into bed until I was happy he wasn't going to choke to death on his own vomit during the night.

Imloth leaned heavily against my side. The top of his head barely cleared my shoulders, making me feel like an ogress babysitting a pixie. "An excellent idea," he agreed. His forehead furrowed, and he swallowed. "The world is moving. Perhaps if I start moving the world will stop?"

This was going to be a long night. "Can't hurt to try," I said, and guided the drow's stumbling steps through the doorway.

We careened up and down the mostly empty hall for a while, Imloth leaning on me all the way. At a certain point he started playing with my hair and giggling at the way my one loose curl bounced back when he tugged on it. I just tried to ignore him. It could have been worse. He could have been an angry drunk, or a horny drunk, or a weepy drunk, or a manic drunk. Instead, he was one of the least offensive drunks out there – a _cuddly_ drunk. I did kind of wish he'd give me my arm back, though. He was clutching it like it was his binkie.

After a while, footsteps echoed down the hall. Imloth's head lifted. So did mine. There was a certain straightforward, determined cadence to those footsteps that I thought I recognized. That cadence couldn't belong to a drow, because drow sidled obliquely past obstacles, whereas _these_ footsteps gave the distinct impression that their owner's approach to any obstacle was to walk right up to it and punch it in the face until it apologized for getting in his way and moved the fuck aside.

A few moments later, a tall, red-haired vision in mithril rounded the corner, then stopped with a visible little jump of surprise. "Oh! Rebecca. I was just-" He broke off. Blue eyes widened, then narrowed. "What in the Hells is happening here?"

That was going to be hard to explain, especially as Imloth had just chosen that moment to lay his head on my shoulder and sing in my ear. "Long story," I said. I shifted a little under the drow's weight. "Uh. You mind giving me a hand? He's heavier than he looks."

Valen looked at Imloth, sighed, and strode forward to relieve me of my soused burden. "What happened?" he asked. His voice was resigned, as if this was nothing he hadn't seen before.

Imloth's head rolled back limply. His eyes tried to focus on the Valen's face. "I told her," he confided, his voice slurring. "About Triel. So she would understand." He sniffled a little, then smiled. "But all is well because I drank…" He held up his hand and held up his fingers one at a time, as if counting, before finally beaming and holding up his forefinger. "One!"

Valen looked at his friend suspiciously. "One what?"

"One…" Imloth had to stop and think. "One bottle."

Valen gave the drow an incredulous scowl. "One bottle of _what_? Baatorian whiskey?"

Imloth smiled dreamily. "Ambrosia."

Valen snorted. "If it had been ambrosia, you would not smell like you have been swimming in the vilest bub this side of Dogskull Way." His head reared back a little, and he waved a hand in front of his face, his scowl deepening. "Speaking of which, would you kindly breathe in the _other_ direction?" At the sound of my laughter, he turned his scowl on me. "And would _you_ please stop laughing?"

I tried, but I just couldn't, especially when Imloth started stroking Valen's hair and cooing. "Sorry."

"Do not be sorry, just-" Valen stopped in mid-sentence and batted Imloth's hands away from his hair. " _Stop_ that," he growled at his tipsy friend.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Not that I could blame Imloth - Valen _did_ have very pretty hair. It was such a vibrant shade of red, and looked far silkier than mine could ever be. "You got him from here?" I asked.

"Yes." Valen looked at me, and his face softened into uncertainty. "Thank you for looking after him."

I shrugged. "De nada." I looked at his confused expression and smiled. "It was nothing." I hesitated. "See you tomorrow?" At his nod, my smile broadened. "All right." I gave Imloth's white hair a light tug. "Sweet dreams, _abbil_ ," I told the drow, and sauntered away.

Voices and footsteps came from over my shoulder. "I…do not feel well." That was Imloth. "At all."

"If you vomit on me, I am going to carry you to the nearest fountain and throw you into it."

Imloth giggled. "That would be unkind."

"To the fountain? Yes, very."

I grinned to myself and left them to their argument. Imloth would be fine. He was in good hands.

My good mood lasted until I got to my chambers, which were silent and empty and cold.

I ignored the silence as best I could and paused by the console. The clasps of my earrings clicked quietly as I undid them. The earrings hit the table with a hissing jingle. My bracelets followed with two heavy, metallic thumps. I tugged off my boots and threw them to one side with a sigh of relief. A few tugs, and my hair was free, too. I scattered the pins over the table and ran my fingers through my hair, shaking it loose and rubbing the tension from my scalp. This time, my sigh of relief was almost a groan. _Almost there._ I looked down at myself. _Now how do I get out of this thing?_

After some confused fumbling, silk finally whispered to the floor, followed by the heavier murmur of suede, and at last I stepped free of my ridiculous trappings, curling my bare toes in the carpet and stretching luxuriantly. I'd almost forgotten how uncomfortable fancy dress could be - and how good it felt to finally be rid of it at the end of a long day.

Enserric glimmered. "You know, if you were to devote half the attention you normally pay to the pursuit of physical pleasure to the pursuit of knowledge, instead, you might even learn something."

I stretched again. "That's good advice. You know what I'm going to do with that advice?"

Enserric sighed. "Ignore it completely?"

I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. " _Exactly_." Then I went to enjoy a nice, long, hot bath. I wanted this makeup off, and after that, well, it had been a stressful day and an exciting night, and me and my right hand had an appointment to keep.

* * *

It was later. I stared at the ceiling, wide awake. I felt tired to the bone, but couldn't sleep. " _Why_ can't I sleep?"

Red glitter bloomed in Enserric's blade. "Was that a rhetorical question, or did you truly wish an answer?"

I turned my head to look at the sword where it leaned against my bedside table. "Guess that depends on the answer."

"Ah. Well, at least you are honest." Enserric flickered for a moment. "I believe that I may have – may even _be_ – the answer to that."

I frowned. "Explain."

"You believe that this sword is draining your life force."

I laughed bitterly. "How else do you explain how I got less than a mile away from you and I felt like I'd aged fifty years?"

Enserric's voice turned a tad waspish. " _Think_ , wielder. My main purpose is to transfer the life energies of our victims to you. Why would I take any of yours?"

My temper flared. I had a war on my plate, all kinds of folks out for my blood, drow plots to untangle, I missed my friends, and now Enserric wanted me to fucking _philosophize_? "Get to the point," I snapped. "What's happening, if not that?"

"Our bond is strengthening," Enserric answered. "Your body is now so accustomed to my presence that it begins to falter without it."

I frowned. "Doesn't the magic work from a distance?"

"Evidently not. The spells attenuate. They weaken. And thus, so do you." Enserric's voice went so far down in the dumps, it was practically decomposed. "And thus, so do I."

I jerked in surprise. "What do you mean, so do you?"

Enserric hesitated. "When you were away, I felt as if my mind was in a fog." His voice lowered, going dour. "It was…not pleasant. And it grew worse the farther you strayed. By the time I understood what was happening, I could barely summon the words to send Deekin to you."

My blood ran cold. "So you're saying we could both die or…whatever, if we got too far away from each other."

"Perhaps, perhaps not," Enserric allowed. "Perhaps we might adapt to existing apart, just as we have adapted to existing together."

I'd been right. I really had been in withdrawal. From a fucking _sword_. "So I could get over it," I said. "Theoretically."

"Theoretically, yes. Though it is likely to take time."

I stared at nothing, thinking. It had taken me months to get clean, last time. "How long?"

"I do not know."

And I didn't have time to experiment, especially not if the experiment left me in a weakened state right in time for the Valsharess to come knocking. "Shit."

Enserric's voice was almost conciliatory. "There are advantages."

"Really?" I laughed hollowly. "Go on. I'd love to hear this."

Enserric went on, undaunted. "Very well. Tell me, then. When did you last sleep, and how well?"

My blood chilled. "You know the answer to that."

"Do you feel as weary as you should?"

I felt a muscle jump in my jaw as my teeth ground together. "No. I don't."

My sword glimmered. "There. You see? Conduits work both ways."

"Really? So what's coming your way?" I laughed hollowly. "Are you getting something out of this fucking devil's bargain we're in?"

Enserric hesitated. "I think I have become sharper," he answered. "Not only in the literal sense, but in the mental sense, as well. Things are…clearer, as of late." His voice lowered, brooding. "And I am…remembering."

"Remembering what?" As if in response, an image flashed in my head – a young girl, dark-haired, pale. I'd never seen her before in my life, but the image was so clear it was almost as if I _had_ seen her, and there was…strangeness surrounding her, a jumble of emotions I couldn't begin to make sense of. "Oh, fuck. Where did that come from?"

Enserric's voice was flat. "Nine Hells. You saw that?"

"Of course I saw it," I said wildly. It had been as vivid as my own memories. "Who _was_ that?"

The sword's silence stretched out so far, its end was like a rope snapping. "My daughter."

The breath went out of me. "You had a-" I stopped, parts of my brain re-arranging themselves to try to take in this new information. It was hard to do, until I thought of the weary-looking man I'd seen in Talona's cage, and then it was easier. He'd looked like he had lots of regrets, that man. "All right," I said, recovering. "So you had a daughter. What happened to her?"

Enserric spoke crisply. "I have no idea what happened to her. I grew bored with the family life and left her to her mother's care when she was barely old enough to speak. If she is alive today, she would be older than I was when I died, and no doubt would not welcome my intrusion into her life, particularly in this form." His voice sharpened. "And, _please_ , spare me your hamfisted attempts at consolation. I am fully aware that I was a terrible father, no thanks to you."

I jerked. "No thanks to me?" I barked. "What do I have to do with your shitty parenting skills?"

"It never used to trouble me, when I was alive," Enserric snapped back. "I believed that I had far more important things to do than to mind some mewling brat. Then I died, and it troubled me even less, mostly because my memories have been so fragmented that I could not even be certain they were even true memories. Perhaps they were figments of my imagination. Perhaps I am and have ever been no more than a sword, dreaming of being human." He took a breath he didn't need and didn't have lungs to take. "And then that blasted drow started yammering about his daughter – proving, by the way, that even in letting his own daughter die he was still a better father than I ever was - and between him and that bleeding heart of yours, you have _forced_ me to remember things I would much rather forget."

I snorted. "I'm not forcing you to do anything."

"No more than I am forcing _you_ to do anything, yet here we are," Enserric retorted.

My heart sank. I was wide awake, I couldn't sleep, and yet, I felt exhausted in a way that I didn't think sleep could cure. "Here we are," I echoed. In the Underdark, surrounded by some of the most fucked-up people in the multiverse – a society of people born and bred to murder and connive their way to the top, where the men were treated like second class citizens, and where even those few who escaped this dog-eat-dog hellhole were still emotional basketcases. _And I think I've just made things worse for Nathyrra by freaking out on her._

"Most likely," Enserric intoned.

I scowled at him. "Stop reading my mind."

"Stop thinking so bloody loud, then."

I let my head fall back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling again, wide awake, my head spinning with images of drow and daggers and masked men and tears and pain and secrets, surrounding me like a spider's web.

It was going to be a long night.


	41. Chemistry

_A/N: Here, have an Easter/Passover/weekend/any-other-holiday-I-might-be-missing present. Anyone who can successfully guess Rebecca's next move after the end of this chapter gets a cookie.  
_

* * *

 _I remember when I found out about chemistry_  
 _It was a long, long way from here_  
 _I was old enough to want it but younger than I wanted it to be_  
 _Suddenly my mission was clear_

 _So for a while we conducted experiments_  
 _In an apartment by the River Road_  
 _And we found out that the two things we put together_  
 _Had a bad tendency to explode_

 _All about chemistry  
_ _Won't you show me everything you know  
_ _Ah, wonder what you do to me_  
 _oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh_

\- Semisonic, "Chemistry"

~  
Chapter 41: Chemistry  
~

When I woke again and left my quarters – feeling far too rested for what little sleep I'd gotten, but best not to think too hard about _that_ – the temple was still quiet, in a way that said everyone was either asleep or plotting something.

I paused outside my door, an armful of bags clutched to my chest, and breathed in deeply. There was a heavenly smell in the air. It smelled like breakfast.

The kitchen was warm and bustling, proving that life in the Underdark was a lot like life on the surface, only with less light and more murder.

Laele was at the counter, rolling out some dough. Next to her was a huge metal man wearing a frilly white apron. I squeezed my eyes shut as hard as I could, then peeled them open cautiously. _Nope. I'm not hallucinating. That's **definitely** a golem in an apron. _ "Cupron?"

Metal chimed against stone as Cupron turned. "Greetings, Rebecca Blumenthal," he said in his echoing voice. "What is your status?"

"My status is confused, thanks." I set my bags down on the counter and eyed him. "I know I might regret asking this, but why are you wearing an apron?"

Cupron's malleable metal lips formed a bashful smile. "I am learning."

I looked at the golem more closely. His hands were covered in flour. "Learning to what? To cook?"

Cupron's eyes flickered thoughtfully. "Learning to understand," he corrected. "I have observed that both the cooking and eating of food are primary activities of many sentient beings. At first I thought this was a matter of mere energy acquisition, but I am beginning to understand that these activities are part of a complex social ritual which I do not understand. Therefore, I queried Laele-"

A deft whisk of Laele's rolling pin smoothed a stubborn corner of the dough to perfect flatness. "Asked," she said, without looking up. "Eilistraee love you, Cupron, but that 'query' business makes you sound like a tit."

Cupron's eye-lights went out for a second. Then they flickered back on. "Apologies, but I do not understand. What is a tit, and what sounds does it make?"

I sucked a thoughtful breath between my teeth. "Well, that all depends on how you…" Laele stopped rolling long enough to swat my shoulder lightly and 'tsk' at me. "Ow. All right. Never mind. Forget I said anything."

Cupron looked back and forth between us, then sighed. "I do not understand. It is clear that I have much to learn."

 _No fucking kidding._ "Do golems eat?" I asked.

"No," Cupron informed me. "We do not require physical sustenance. Only the Power Source."

I'd started this conversation confused and it looked like I was going to end it even more confused. I supposed that was progress. Just a shame it was in the wrong direction. "So, what, you're just going to stand there and watch _us_ eat?"

Cupron cocked his head as if puzzled by my question. "No. I will also cook." He looked at Laele, sidelong. "And clean, and move objects from one place to another, as this is apparently an important part of sentient culinary customs."

Laele finally looked up. "Ooh, yes. Speaking of which, would you mind fetching those trays for me, Cupron?" She flashed him a smile even as her fingers busily folded her square of dough over some kind of minced meat filling. Then she leaned across the counter and addressed me in a stage whisper. "Once this war is over, I think I might hire him as an assistant. He is worth his weight in gold."

I looked at the golem's broad reddish back. "Copper, actually."

The drow cook's honey-colored eyes crinkled in a smile. "Oh, no," she demurred, and laughed in delight as Cupron reached into the red-hot oven and pulled out two cookie sheets with his bare hands. "Gold. Definitely gold."

I watched Cupron pick up a spatula between his thumb and forefinger and delicately maneuver it under a cookie. Then I gave up on making any sense of any of this. "All righty, then," I said brightly. So the metal man had decided to become a chef. _Fine._ At least he'd never lack for a trivet. I turned to Laele. "Hey, I wanted to ask you. Would you mind if-" I stopped in mid-sentence.

Nathyrra was seated alone at our usual breakfast table in the corner. I hadn't seen her – the woman could blend into the background like nobody else. She'd seen me, though. She met my eyes for a split second, then, stiffly, she looked away and rose to her feet and left by the back door to the kitchen, leaving her breakfast half-uneaten.

Blumenthals were basically immune to shame. Generations of breeding and privilege had ensured that. Nonetheless, I was pretty sure the hot sensation creeping up my neck was either shame or something a lot like it.

Part of me wanted to dash after Nathyrra and apologize. Another part wanted to call her out on that withholding-vital-information thing. Her former employer _was_ trying to kill me, and there was no telling whether Nathyrra's reluctance to talk about her past had kept me in the dark about stuff that could potentially save my life – or end it. Yet another part, the prudent part, pointed out that it didn't really matter whether I apologized or not, because if I went near Nathyrra in the mood she was in, I was going to get my dumb ass shanked.

Shame, outrage, and prudence fought a brief three-way war. Prudence won. I slid onto a stool and put my head in my hands. "Gods damn it."

Laele was looking at me with a too-understanding smile. "Patience," she counseled.

I grimaced. "I've never been good at being patient."

"Then learn," Laele said, not _totally_ unsympathetically. "She needs time to think." Her fingers crimped a pie as she spoke. She didn't look down. "She will speak to you when she is ready."

I grunted sourly. "What if the Valsharess gets here and kills us all before that happens?"

"Then many things will remain unspoken," Laele answered. "But I would try not to do that. Dying is bad enough, but dying with words unsaid? That is worse."

Everyone had always told me that drow were subtle. Had I managed to find the only drow in the world who were as blunt as hammers? "I'll try not to do that," I promised. I didn't know if I'd succeed, but I'd try. Nathyrra was a lonely person, and if I'd just driven her deeper into loneliness, I'd have yet another reason not to sleep at night.

Laele nodded. "Good." She regarded me steadily for a few moments before nodding at the bags I'd set on her counter. "What is that?"

I shook myself out of my reverie. "Alchemy ingredients," I answered. I held up an empty vial. "You mind if I make potions here? You have the tools and counter space I can't find anywhere else."

Laela popped a dumpling onto a fresh tray. "Anything poisonous?"

I went over a mental list of ingredients. "No. I mean, not unless you're stupid enough to try drinking quicksilver, but I don't think you are."

Laele chuckled. "Fair enough." She gestured at one corner of the counter. "As long as you keep out of the way, you are welcome to stay as long as you like." She looked at Cupron, and her smile deepened into something close to a laugh, making dimples dance at the corners of her mouth. "You did, after all, find me a marvelous new assistant."

I gave her a broad grin. "You're a peach, Laele," I said, and set to work.

Vials _plink_ 'ed against the marble counter as I set them out in a neat row. A brief search turned up a clear glass pitcher of fresh water. I fought briefly with my hair to make it let go of the chain of my holy symbol, and lifted the amulet over my head. The amulet and its chain pooled in my hand, heavy and warm. They were made of some dark grey metal – tungsten, maybe. I'd never asked about the particulars. The wind-and-hands symbol on the amulet's face, on the other hand, was pale, like platinum. It was strange to see the amulet from this angle, stranger still to feel its weight in my hand and not at my neck. I felt exposed - and not, as poor, departed Sharwyn might have put it, in a good way.

Trying not to rush, I dipped the holy symbol into the water and let a whisper of power run through me. The amulet went cool. Then the water swirled, and bright motes of white light flashed in its currents, just for an instant, like fireflies caught in a whirlwind.

I breathed out in relief. The water was sanctified, or at least as sanctified as Shaundakul could make it, which meant that it was now either holy or moonshine. I took my amulet out of the water, dried it, and put it back on gratefully.

I rinsed the corks and the insides of the vials with a dribble of holy water. Farghan had taught me that, too. Potion-making depended so much on making sure you added the right ingredients in the right way, and any little contaminant in your vial could screw the whole thing up. I'd learned that the hard way, when a single mote of dandelion fluff had floated into my potion of regeneration and to make a long story short we'd had to take a pair of hedge clippers to that poor lumberjack and then we'd had to take him to a _real_ healer down in Silverymoon so he could stop sprouting leaves every time it rained. The crew down at the Bubbling Cauldron had gotten a good month of jokes out of _that_ one – at my expense, of course.

Laele provided a mortar and pestle. I rinsed that with holy water, too. Then I opened my little linen sack of fenberries and set to work, stripping them from their stems and popping them out of their skins.

The mortar was half-full of naked berries when a frail shadow fell over it, robbing me of the already-dim light. I looked up, frowning.

Lomylithrar danced a half-step back in the choreography of mild terror. "I beg your pardon," he stammered. He had one of the Seer's tea tins clutched to his skinny chest. He looked at it, then held it out to Laele like a primitive villager making an offering to an angry volcano goddess. "The Seer is out. Of tea. M-may I?"

Laele smiled at the avariel and pulled another, bigger tin off of a shelf. "Help yourself, love," she said, placing the tin in front of him and patting his hand absently before going back to stuffing what looked like a headless chicken but I suspected was actually some kind of chicken-sized, two-legged lizard, since it had arms instead of wings. _I just hope that isn't dinner._ And if it was, I hoped Deekin never saw it. He'd freak so hard they'd hear him in Thay.

Tea leaves rustled, filling Lomylithrar's tin to the brim, but instead of leaving with his prize, he lingered, watching me work. "Are those fenberries?" he blurted. His big green eyes went to my neat rows of vials. "Do you plan to make some healing potions?"

I looked up again, surprised. "Yeah. You an herbalist?"

The avariel's lips trembled into and out of a smile, as if he was trying to smile but was a little too nervous to make the expression take. "I…was." He took a deep breath. "I suppose I still am." Then he set down his tin and looked at me from behind a few strands of silky black hair. "W…would you like some help?" He studied my face and gulped. "Please. I…I would like to be of use to you. To anyone."

 _If you wanted to be useful, you'd go offer to help Imloth's trainees with target practice – as the target,_ was my first, instinctive response. But then I thought of the look of grandmotherly disappointment the Seer would give me if I actually said such a thing out loud, and I managed to keep the cutting response caged behind my teeth. Barely. "Be my guest," was all I said, and gestured at the stool next to me.

Lomylithrar took his seat with an alacrity that said he was expecting me to change my mind and wanted to have something to hang on to in case I tried to throw him out of the kitchen. I could have told him he was worrying over nothing. Nobody but Laele threw people out of Laele's kitchen. "Thank you," he murmured, and helped himself to a bunch of berries.

I watched the avariel from the corner of my eye. _He's just so damn strange._ Maybe that was why he left me feeling so off-kilter. He was even more elven, more _alien_ to my eyes, than most elves – his face more angular, his eyes bigger, his bone structure more delicate. And then there were his wings, or what was left of them. The dude had almost as many extra appendages as Valen, but where Valen's made him look exotic, Lomylithrar's just made him look pathetic. "Didn't think an avariel would have much to do with plants," I observed, after a while. "My old teacher said you don't do much farming."

The avariel shrugged a little without slowing his berry-stripping. "Yes, and no," he said. "We…that is, the avariel live in isolation in the far North, and have spent many centuries weaving spells to make their home a warm, green place amidst the ice." His eyes stayed on his hands as he spoke. "They do not believe in…in forcing plants to grow out of time and place, it is true, but they nurture the wild plants so that they gladly yield their fruits."

 _He keeps saying 'they',_ I noticed _. Not_ ' _we'_. Maybe that was the only way he could deal with the loss of his people – make like they weren't even his people anymore. "Do avariel eat meat?"

He averted his eyes from Laele's roast-whatever-it-was. "No."

No wonder he was so skinny. "They have a lot of surface fruit down at the market," I offered. Some impulse – insanity, stupidity, or maybe just pity – made me add, "I could get some for you, the next time I'm there." It probably wasn't a good idea for him to go, given that the drow would probably give him a free drawing and quartering with his purchase.

The avariel's smile wavered a little less, this time. "I would like that." He brought the cluster of berries to his nose and breathed in their scent. "I miss the smell of the surface." His smile faded. "The Underdark smells like mold and blood."

Laele's kitchen actually smelled like dinner, but I knew what he meant. "It does," I agreed. Listlessly, I squeezed another berry into the mortar. "Man, what I'd give for some fresh air."

Lomylithrar sighed in fellow feeling. "What I would give to see the sky again."

Pain settled in the back of my head. I tried to ignore it. "Me, too."

The elf went on morosely. "And how I yearn for the sound of the wind." Tears filled his eyes. "The song of the wind over the mountain passes at night…there is nothing quite like it. It lulled me to sleep many a night, when I was young."

I remembered all those nights I lay in my bed in Drogan's house, listening to the sigh of the wind through the valley and feeling the tension of a long and tiring day bleed away, bit by bit, until I finally drifted off to sleep. Tears filled my own eyes, and not only from the pain of the geas. "I know what you mean. I used to live in the mountains."

The avariel shot me a startled look. "Truly? Where?"

"The Nether Mountains. Near Silverymoon."

"Oh." Lomylithrar looked down again. "I have never been there." He swallowed. "Before…before all this, I had never left my home." His pause was a little too long, and verged on awkward. "But I…I am sure your old home is lovely. The mountains always are."

I smiled, remembering. "It is." Then again, this whole world was lovely. Even the Underdark had its moments, although it was hard to appreciate its beauty when you either couldn't see it or it was trying to kill you. Or both.

We peeled the remaining berries in silence. When the whole pile was done, I drizzled them with honey from what had probably been the most expensive honeycomb in the history of beekeeping, since it had come from a drow market about five hundred miles and a five hundred percent markup from the surface. Then I ground it all into a pulp in the mortar and dumped the pulp into a cheesecloth. The cloth cut into my skin as I wound the excess around my fingers and _squeezed_. Berry juice dripped into a bowl – first in a stream, and then in a steady drip-drip.

By the time the pulp was dry, my hands were so cramped that Lomylithrar insisted on taking over, and I didn't argue. He spooned the juice into the vials and topped them off with holy water. By then, my hands had recovered enough to give the potions a quick stir with an amber rod. Three stirs clockwise, and each potion flashed to uniform ruby-red, then gave off a brief but lively exhalation of steam.

I exhaled, too – in relief. That was what was supposed to happen, but I hadn't been sure I'd been remembering everything right, since I usually relied on my notes and the Valsharess had those now. _May her tits sag prematurely._

The next potion was more of a challenge to do without notes. "Ash." I looked around with a sinking heart. "I need ash."

Lomylithrar wiped the counter clean of every speck of berry juice, his movements fussy and precise. "What are you making next?"

I jiggled my leg, thinking. "I don't know what diseases might be down here, but I don't have any remedies for anything. Thought I'd make a basic cure-all, but my recipe calls for a pinch of charcoal ash."

Laele came over, wiping her hands on a towel. "What kind of charcoal?" she asked.

I frowned. "Wood. I think."

Laele clicked her tongue against her teeth. "We do not have wood, but we do burn mushroom stalks, which are not _too_ different." She turned to Cupron. "Cupron, would you please take a piece of charcoal out of the fire for us?"

Cupron nodded. "Yes. I will do this. It is within my power to accommodate your request, and it is also my desire to help you, as a fellow sentient being and valued ally." Crossing to the hearth, he stuck a hand right into the fire and drew out a chunk of blackened mushroom stalk. Then he turned back to us. "Where would you like it, please?"

I was starting to see why Laele was so chuffed to have the golem as an assistant. Casting around, I pointed to an empty spot on the counter. "Put it there, please." I paused. "Um. I don't suppose you could crush it, could you?"

The golem held his hand at a point almost exactly a foot above the place I'd indicated and clenched his fist. There was a powdery crunch. Then he opened his fist a little, and fine black ash sifted down, forming a neat pile. "Is this adequate?"

I would have hugged him, only I was afraid it would be like hugging a hot teakettle, so I settled for smiling. "It's perfect, Cupron. Thank you."

The golem beamed. "I am pleased that you are pleased."

By then, Laele had clearly given up on cooking and was just leaning on the counter, watching the show with naked curiosity. "What next?" she asked.

Lomylithrar cleared his throat. "Possibly cinnamon?" he said, in a tone of voice that said he knew it was definitely cinnamon but was pretending he wasn't sure so as not to embarrass me.

I kept my face straight. "Right. Cinnamon. I was just about to say that." I turned to Laele. "Do you have any cinnamon?"

Laele did, in fact, have some cinnamon, stashed in her treasure trove of spices she'd brought here from the surface. A single pinch and a counterclockwise stir with a silver spoon made each potion bubble and turn the right shade of turquoise.

I bagged and tagged the curative potions, then sat back, gnawing on my lip. Having seen what Valen could do when I sped him up with divine power, a haste potion might come in handy. Farghan's recipe called for a single seed from a Calishite hot pepper, a drop of quicksilver, and a stir with a hawk's feather, but what kind of hawk, and how big? And I couldn't even remember how I was supposed to stir. Clockwise? Counter-clockwise? Once, twice, three times? With the quill end, or the feathery end? Or did I just dump the thing in and shake everything up? I couldn't remember. I rested my head in my hands. "Damn it." The Valsharess had taken Silent Partner, she'd taken my freedom, and now? I couldn't even make my potions. She'd taken that from me, too, and suddenly all the confidence I'd talked myself into had evaporated and I was just tired and this was just crazy and I just wanted to be anywhere but here. "I can't do this."

Something scraped against the counter. I lifted my eyes just enough to see a plate with one of those little blue sticky-buns on it, and lifted my eyes further to see Laele's smile. "I know that I, for one, cannot think on an empty stomach," she told me, nodding at the pastry. "Eat! It will help."

My mouth watered. I drew the plate to me. "Bless you, Laele," I said, and bit into the bun, all pillowy and salty-sweet. My life was a little shit right now, but hey, at least there was Laele and her pastries, so it wasn't _completely_ shit.

A figure leaned into my field of view. It was Lomylithrar, his scarred face further marred with a frown. "What potion are you trying to make?"

I finished the bun and cleaned my fingers on a napkin, thinking. "I'm trying to make a haste potion, but I don't have a hawk feather to stir it with."

The avariel tapped his fingers thoughtfully against the counter. "As I recall, any feather will do, as long as it comes from a swift-flying creature."

I flushed and shrugged. "I don't know about that." I'd never really cared enough to learn how any of this alchemy stuff worked. All I cared about was that it worked - as long as I followed the recipe. In hindsight, maybe I should have taken the time to learn. "My teacher always used a hawk's feather." I frowned. "He _did_ say it was for the speed, though."

Lomylithrar stared at his hands. "I used to fly…quite quickly," he managed, his voice cracking a little. "When I lived under the sky."

I turned to look at him. "What?" I looked at what was left of his wings. "No. You're not suggesting…"

The avariel shrugged. The stumps of his wings moved in a sad mimicry of the motion. "Why not?" All of a sudden, he turned, presenting his back to me. "Take one. Go on." His voice was bitter. "I have no need of feathers. I know I will never fly again."

I stared at the elf's wing-stumps. "But-"

Something like anger put a snap in his voice. " _Take it_. Now. Before I lose my nerve."

I didn't see a way out of this, unless I put him to sleep with a spell and ran for it. I looked for the smallest, downiest feather I could find, and before I lost _my_ nerve, I took it between my fingertips and yanked, like I was waxing his eyebrows and not pulling feathers from his already mangled wings.

Lomylithrar jerked and made a small noise in his throat, but otherwise didn't react. "Is it done?"

I looked at the little speckled black-brown feather in my hand. It was a good thing I was used to guilt, or else this would have been really awkward. "Yeah." It dawned on me that 'yeah' was pretty inadequate, as statements went. "Thank you. That was…" I groped for the right word. "That was really helpful of you."

The avariel drew in a deep breath, then blew it out and turned back to me. "Good," he said, his voice firming. His face was even paler than usual, but there was a strange peace in it. "I am sick to death of bemoaning what I have lost and being of no use to anyone in the process. Better to find ways to be of use with what remains to me."

Laele arched an eyebrow. "So you let Rebecca pluck you like a chicken?"

Lomylithrar snorted, and an edge came to his voice that held echoes of the way he'd been when I first met him. "I _am_ a chicken, Laele. What else do you call a winged creature whose wings have been clipped, feathers plucked, talons blunted, and who is very likely to end his life turning on a drow spit?"

The chef laid a reassuring hand on the avariel's shoulder. "Come now, Lomylithrar. We would never eat you." She grinned a moon-faced grin. "You are far too stringy."

The avariel laughed shortly, then made a face and pulled his robes tighter around his shoulders, revealing their bony points. He really was built like a bird, only he didn't even have feathers to give him the illusion of plumpness. "That I am," he said, and shivered. "And I am cold. Why is it always so cold here?"

Laele took the avariel gently by the shoulders and steered him to the side of the counter that stood closest to the stove. "Because you are underground, and we are too far from the nearest magma vent for proper warmth." She patted a stool. "Set yourself there, love, and I'll get you some tea and something to eat, shan't I?"

The avariel smiled. "Yes, Laele," he said, as mild as he'd previously been sharp, and watched with bemused fondness as she bustled away. Then he turned to me, lowering his voice. "Do you know, I thought I would hate the drow." His voice was a little sad. "My people taught me that the drow were all as black-hearted as they were black-skinned."

I looked after Laele. "So what changed your mind?"

"Becoming black-hearted," the elf replied starkly. "It was really quite easy to fall into sin, and the experience left me with a certain sympathy for sinners." He frowned. "Sometimes I even find myself thinking things…" He trailed off, and shook his head, his voice leaden. "Thinking thoughts that neither my heart nor my mind ever held before. It is as if Talona tunneled through me, and where she passed, she left a hole where dark things might sneak in."

I remembered the bodies in Talona's temple. Some of them had had feathers. I tried to imagine how I'd feel if some madness came over me and made me do things like that. I tried to imagine how I'd feel, when I came back to myself and saw the bodies and _remembered._ I tried to imagine that, and failed. "Thinking's not a problem," I said, after a long pause. "We all have ugly thoughts sometimes." At least, I hoped so, or else I needed even more help than I thought. "It's what you do that matters." _And let's hope Talona herself never crawls back through that hole._ I kind of liked the elf - enough that I didn't want to have to put him down like a rabid dog.

Lomylithrar lifted his hand as if to clasp a holy symbol, but he stopped short, as if remembering it wasn't there anymore. His fingers closed slowly on empty air, then tightened into a fist. "I hope you are right." He lowered his hand, took a very slow and deliberate breath, clasped his hands neatly in his lap, and looked up. "Now, what was it you said you needed?" he asked briskly, clearly wanting to change the subject. "A red pepper?"

Laele, bless her heart, promptly produced a pepper, which wasn't Calishite but was just as hot, because the drow liked food that bit back. Carefully, I scraped the seeds out, crushed them one at a time, tipped them into each vial, and chased each seed with a drop of quicksilver from the city market.

Then I hesitated. _Here goes nothing._ I stirred the first potion with Lomylithrar's wingfeather. The liquid bubbled a little, like champagne, and when it was done, it had turned pitch-black with little red streaks, just like it was supposed to. I sagged. "Thank Shaundakul. It worked." Pulling myself together, I stirred the rest of the potions, and when I was done, Laele held out a clean napkin, and I placed the avariel's feather in it. Laele bustled off to clean it, and I turned back to Lomylithrar. "Thanks, Lomytl…" I spluttered and went a little cross-eyed. "Okay. Sorry. I can't pronounce your name. Could I please just call you Lomy?"

The avariel gave me a startled look, then smiled. "I would not object to that."

 _Thank fuck._ As far as I was concerned, the elven languages had been invented solely to confuse everybody else. "Good. Thank you." Laele returned with the feather, fluffy and clean. I took it and held it out to Lomy. "Here's your feather back."

The avariel looked at his wingfeather. "Keep it," he said. His voice was as soft as ever, but there was that bitter note again. "Please. If I could forget that I ever had wings, I would be that much happier."

I didn't argue. "Thank you," I said simply, and added his feather to my pack.

Lomy nodded. "What next?"

I pulled my red silk scarf from its loop on my belt and tied it around my face. "You might want to stand back for this one," I said, and started taking chokepowder vials from my potions pouch and lining them up on the counter.

The avariel watched as I pulled the last item out of my stash - a very tiny glass ampoule of fine brown powder. "What is that?" he asked.

I grinned. "A trick I learned from a druid friend." Carefully, I swaddled the ampoule in a damp tea towel. I didn't want any of this stuff to escape and get into the air. "He made his chokepowder with some very special mushrooms. As luck would have it, there's a merchant here who sells all kinds. I told him to give me the strongest stuff he had."

Lomy eyed me and my ampoule, then took a large step back. "Should we be breathing this?"

The merchant had handled this ampoule with a pair of tongs. "Probably not a good idea, no," I said, and cracked the ampoule's seal.

Neither Laele nor Lomy opted to help me out on this one. Alone in a suddenly expanding circle of empty space, I eased the ampoule out of its swaddling and tapped a few grains of the brown powder into my chokepowder vials. Then I dunked the empty vial in a bucket of water along with its towel, re-sealed my chokepowder, and wiped the outsides of the vials with another damp towel. "Okay," I said, turning to Laele. "You might want to leave this stuff outside for a bit. Like, a tenday."

Laele eyed the bucket warily. "What will this do to anyone who inhales it?"

"Make your skin feel like it's peeling off, your eyes feel like they're melting, your lungs feel like you just inhaled lava, and make you see shit that'll blow your mind," I answered cheerfully.

"Lovely." Laele pulled on a pair of heavy gloves. "And you use this on your enemies?"

I shrugged. "Better them than me."

Laele picked up the bucket, holding it at arm's length. "In that case, you owe me a new bucket. And two towels."

Who knew that drow could be skinflints? "Fine. Just hand me a bill when you've figured it out."

"I most certainly will," Laele said blithely, and carried the bucket off – carefully.

Lomy and I were slotting the last of the vials into my potions box when a short, scaly ball of crazy stormed into the kitchen, waving a piece of parchment. "Boss!" it shrieked, brandishing a paper at me. "I found it! Where you been? Deekin found it!"

I glanced at the bard. "Found what?"

"The solution to your little problem," the kobold answered, and waggled his eyebrow ridges conspiratorially. "You knows?"

 _Great._ Now everyone thought I had erectile dysfunction or something. "All right," I said, turning my attention to the bard. "You wanna show me this brilliant solution of yours?"

He did.

Deekin hustled me out of the kitchen, barely leaving me time to say my thanks and goodbyes and gather my stuff.

I let the kobold drag me down the hall. "So what's the story?" I muttered. "Not to mention the rush."

The little bard was almost bouncing on his toes as he walked. "Deekin _knew_ he remembered seeing something that could help Boss, but it took a while to find it," he burbled. "Turns out it was way back in Deekin's notes on Silverymoon, from when Deekin got _this_." He patted his bag of holding.

I didn't get it. "You want to buy me a bag?"

Deekin sighed. " _No_ , Boss," he said with a patience that sounded a little too patient to be actual patience. "But there was an itsy bitsy bottle in that shop that Deekin thinks could be the answer to your problems – if we can finds one like it here." The tip of a fang showed in his frown. "Deekin be hoping somebody in the city sells it, but we needs a translator, 'cause it probably gonna be hard to find even in drowish."

I thought for a second, then grinned. "Don't worry," I reassured the bard. Looking around, I chose the corridor leading to the practice room. "I know just the man for the job."

Deekin perked up. "Who?"

"Valen."

The kobold paused. "Uh."

I hadn't expected my suggestion to meet with _that_ little enthusiasm. "Uh, what?"

Deekin rolled his eyes. "Uh, there not be anybody else?"

"Imloth, I guess," I conceded. Lomy didn't speak drowish, Laele had troops to feed, the Seer was too much of a high-value target to leave the temple without an armed escort, and Nathyrra would probably tell me to go to hell. "But he got pretty drunk last night, so I don't think he'll be up to much this morning." I caught the kobold's skeptical snout-wrinkle. "Valen's a smart guy, and he's been living with drow for a while. He'll do fine."

The kobold stared at me like I'd sprouted a spare head. "Hold up a minute. Do we… _likes_ goat-man now?"

I sighed. "Please don't call him that, Deeks." The sound of clashing weapons was coming from down the right-hand hallway. I turned, following it. "I asked him to be more polite to you, and he's trying. I'd appreciate it if you could return the favor, okay?"

The bard kept staring at me. "So we _do_ likes him."

I flushed and looked around. The drow in the hallway didn't _look_ like they were listening to us, but that didn't mean they weren't. "He's all right," I said defensively. "You just have to get to know him."

Deekin gave me a long, pointed look – which he was actually pretty good at, what with his long and pointy snout. "Is that what you be doing all day yesterday? Getting to know goa…the General?"

I shrugged. "We were talking, yes," I said stiffly. "But it wasn't all day." I paused, thinking back. Uncertainty crept into my voice. "Was it?"

"Close enough." Deekin looked at me searchingly. "What you guys be talking about for so long, anyhow?"

I bit my lip. "Um. Well. He apologized for being so suspicious…"

Deekin's eyes bulged. "He _apologized_?" Then his eyes narrowed. "Like, with the word 'sorry' and everything?"

"Yeah. And then I, uh..." I rubbed the back of my neck. "I, uh, told him. You know. About my little lightning problem. And, uh, where I come from."

Deekin stopped dead in his tracks. "You _what_?" he shrieked.

I winced. "Could you keep your voice down?"

"Like _frzztlik_ Deekin gonna keep his voice down!" the bard hollered. He turned, putting his hands on his hips like a schoolmarm who'd just found one of her students cheating on their multiplication tables. "This is just peachy! It take you months and months to tells Deekin, but you know goat-man for a tenday and already you be spillings the beans!" He threw his hands in the air. " _And_ you tells him to his face, when you only tells Deekin in a note! And then you runs away!"

I looked around. Drow were starting to look. "I did _not_ run-"

The kobold harrumphed. "You did too run!"

I tried to drag the kobold into a side room. He didn't even budge. It was like he'd taken root, right there in the marble. "Okay, fine, I ran, and I should have told you earlier, and I'm sorry," I babbled. "Can we not make this a thing?"

"Make it a thing?" Deekin yelped. "It already _be_ a thing, Boss!"

"I thought you said you forgave me!"

The kobold huffed in annoyance. "Deekin did, up until he finds out you actually _likes_ goat-man."

I waved my hands around, trying and failing to explain. "It's not that I like him, it's just that he's, he's-"

Deekin glowered up at me. "He's?"

My eyes darted. There were too many people here. "He's…not from around here either." I lowered my voice. "He knows what it's like. You know?"

Deekin snorted. "Deekin hatched from an egg and grew up in a cave, so if you think Deekin fits in here, Boss, you gots another thing coming."

That left me temporarily speechless. I was being scolded by a tiny scaly person who didn't wear pants and treated the rules of grammar more like suggestions, and it should have been laughable but it wasn't, because I wasn't being scolded by just any crazy person, I was being taken to task by my _friend_. "You're right," I said at last. I hung my head and scuffed my boot on the floor. "I'm sorry. I just…I guess I was trying to fix some things. You were right when you said I keep too many secrets." I kept secrets even from my closest friends. I didn't really know why. I just didn't want to talk about some things, so I didn't. In retrospect, maybe that wasn't the best idea. "I guess I have to learn to trust people more."

"That be true." The kobold's voice was almost sad. "You keeps lots of secrets. Deekin thinks maybe there be parts of Boss nobody ever sees. Maybe not even Boss." Deekin eyed me sidelong and sighed. "O-kay, fine." He started walking again. "If it make Boss happy, Deekin tries to be super-duper-extra nice to goa…to the General from now on."

In spite of myself, a smile bloomed on my face. Deekin just had that effect on me. "How about just super nice?" I suggested, hurrying after the kobold. "I'm not sure if Valen's ready for super-duper-extra niceness just yet."

We reached the practice room in time to see Valen throw Imloth across it.

Deekin stared. "Super nice? Deekin not so sure the General even be ready for plain ol' _nice_."

I winced in sympathy as I watched Imloth stagger to his feet in a clatter of weaponry, shake himself, and come around for another try at his opponent. "Someone really has to move that quarterstaff rack," I complained.

At the sound of my voice, Valen spun to face me. Something clanged against the back of his breastplate. He didn't seem to notice, though he _did_ stare at me as if I'd just goosed him. "Rebecca!"

Imloth leaned out from behind the tiefling and peered at me around his shoulder. Then he looked down at his rapier. The tip was slightly bent. Frowning thoughtfully, he shifted his stare to Valen, then to me, then back to Valen. His eyes went wide. Then he started to laugh.

Valen's face reddened, and he cast the drow a frowning glance. His tail coiled, then whipped out in a sideways lash. "What is so funny?"

Imloth grinned hugely. "Everything, my friend." He laughed again and clapped Valen on the shoulder. "Everything is amusing. The whole world will make you laugh, if you allow it." Gracefully, he stepped out from behind his friend and bowed to me, his eyes dancing. "Priestess! Welcome! To what do we owe the pleasure of your company?"

I breezed over the threshold. "Oh, I heard talk that Valen was teaching you how to fly, so I came to see the show." That got a laugh, although really anything could get a laugh out of Imloth, so I didn't put too much stock in it. Once I'd drawn near enough, I studied his face. It looked a little drawn, and his eyes looked a little bloodshot, but other than that, he looked a whole lot better than he had the last time I'd seen him. He was obviously used to partying hard. "How are you feeling?"

The drow grinned. "Oh, excellent, excellent. When I first woke I wanted to behead myself, but then the Seer gave me tea made from a tree and now I only feel as if my eyes will shortly fall out."

That explained why the room was so dim. "Glad to hear it," I said lightly, and gave him a measuring look. I felt a flicker of reluctance – we didn't need _two_ translators, after all, and three was already a crowd - but my father _had_ raised me to be polite even if I didn't always behave the way I was raised, so I added, "We were thinking of going to the market. Wanna come with?"

Imloth paused. He looked over at Valen. "Ah…as to that, Ossyr awaits, and I think it is past time I attend to my task for the Seer. Another time, perhaps." He gave me a roguish wink. "I leave our General in your capable hands, priestess. Be gentle with him. He is more fragile than he appears." Smiling to himself, as if amused by some private joke, Imloth bowed, then turned and strutted away with barely a stumble.

I watched the drow go. It was still a nice view. Once he was gone, I turned back to Valen and met his bright blue eyes, at which point I couldn't think of a single thing to say. "Um." Deekin cleared his throat meaningfully. I jumped a little, then cleared _my_ throat. "Ahem. Right. So. We wanted to ask you…"

Valen's face was flushed, probably from the effort of making Imloth soar like an albatross. He looked down at the floor, then back up, studying me from beneath his lashes. He looked simultaneously intrigued and wary. "Yes?"

I gave him my best smile to settle his nerves. "How good is your drowish?"

Hesitantly, an answering smile came to his lips. "Passable. Why do you ask?"

Deekin spoke up. "Deekin found a solution to Boss's problems with the lightnings, only it not gonna be easy to find and we gots to ask around a little." He spoke fast, his demeanour all business and the dumb kobold act all but gone. "Boss said maybe you could help translate for us. Deekin speaks lots of languages, but he not learned drowish yet."

I smiled. "You'll get there, Deeks. Just give you a month, and you'll be confusing the shit out of drow in their own language."

Deekin grinned. "Thanks, Boss."

Valen looked back and forth between us, but he spoke to Deekin. "Do you truly speak so many languages?"

"Sure thing!" the bard chirped. "Deekin can scream for help in eight languages, and just scream in twenty more."

A smile warred with Valen's frown. It was an even match, and led to a very strange expression where both parties vied for control of his face without either one getting a clear win. He kept looking back and forth between me and Deekin. "Why do I get the feeling I am going to regret this?" he wondered.

I smirked. "So you _are_ coming with us."

The weapon-master looked at me, then shook his head with a rueful smile. "I am a veteran of countless battles."

"So?"

"So I know when to sound a retreat."

He was kvetching a little, but he was also smiling a little, which I took to mean that he was willing to be persuaded. "Aw, come on!" I cajoled. I took his hand in mine and pulled him towards the door. "Why the long face? We're going shopping. It'll be fun."

"Fun?" Valen let himself be herded, but his face said he was already having second thoughts. "I am going to worry about you dying to an assassin's blade every step of the way there and every step back."

It was nice to know he cared, even if he _was_ a walking buzzkill. "What's got you so persuaded that something bad's always about to happen?"

Valen's voice was glum. "Experience."

* * *

I turned the bottle over in my hands. Electricity fizzed inside it. "How does it work?"

Deekin's talon _skrink_ 'ed across the glass. "There be lightning inside it. See?"

I raised my eyebrows. "You bought me a lightbulb?" I remembered the pile of platinum that had changed hands, and corrected that to, "An incredibly expensive lightbulb?"

"Yeah, Deekin not know what a lightbulb is, but he be pretty sure you not get how this works, Boss," the kobold said, effectively giving my ego a pair of concrete overshoes and throwing it into the Hudson. "There be an enchantment on the bottle that stores lightning inside. When you needs lightning, you pops the cork, and-" He threw his hands in the air. "Boom!"

I perked up. "Big boom?" I said hopefully.

"Big, big boom," Deekin agreed. He raised a cautionary finger. "But you only gets one shot, so you better make it a good one."

I stared at the bottle in dismay. "I can only use this _once_?"

"Er." Deekin looked at my face and sighed. "Yeah and no. You can use it lotsa times, but you gotta refill it after you use it." A little forced jollity entered his voice. "But don't worry. Just a little spark'll do the trick. The enchantment do the rest."

So I had lightning in a bottle, but once I let it out, I had to stuff it back in somehow before I could use it again. "How long does it take to refill?"

"Dunno." The kobold shot Valen a Look. "Deekin might've asked, but _for some reason_ the shopkeeper was too scared to talk."

Valen's face was perfectly composed. "I wanted to make certain he understood what would happen to him if he tried to cheat us."

"Why you gotta go around threatening everybody?" Deekin grumbled.

Valen arched a crimson eyebrow. "It was not a threat."

"Oh? So what was it, then?"

The tiefling spared a brief, grim smile. "A promise."

Deekin stared at the weapon master, then gave me a sardonic look that said, louder than words, ' _We likes him, huh?'_

I decided that now would be a good time to run interference before the boys started insulting each other. Again. " _Anyhow_ , I've got to learn how to use this," I said brightly. I looked down at the bottle, chewing on my lower lip. "Guess it's time to blow up a few more practice dummies."

Valen cocked his head at me thoughtfully. "I have a better idea."

I returned his look. "I'm listening."

The tiefling gave me a tight-lipped, enigmatic smile. "Follow me."

* * *

Valen led us down the circling streets to the valley floor, where a low homestead of quarried stone stood in a field of mushrooms.

The tension seemed to bleed from the weapon master the further away we got from the city proper and its crowds of potential enemies. By the time we reached what looked for all the world like a farmstead, he seemed almost calm. _Relatively speaking._ He still didn't take his hand away from his weapon, though. I wondered what it would take to get him to really relax and stop seeing enemies around every corner. The same stuff they used to tranquilize elephants, probably.

A drow came out of the homestead as we approached. He was dressed a lot more simply than the drow I'd seen in the tavern, all in brown and grey, and when he spoke to Valen, it was without any of the sneering or posturing I'd seen up above. If a drow could be humble, this guy was it.

Valen bowed to the drow, said a few more words, and led us deeper into the mushroom field. I hurried after him, keeping pace, or trying to. The big white mushroom stalks kept distracting me. From far away, I hadn't realized just how _big_ these things were. They were as tall as trees. "What's the plan?" I asked, my voice low.

"We need somewhere quiet," Valen answered. He drew to a halt with abrupt, soldierly precision and looked around. "This should be far enough." He looked at me sideways, and his voice got a little hesitant. "What do you think? Will this do?"

I looked around. We were in a clearing in the mushroom grove, big enough to fit three people comfortably, but still sheltered and private enough that it felt like we were in our own little pocket plane. The air was warm, musty, and a little humid. I craned my head back, looking up. Huge, feathery white mushroom gills formed a canopy denser than any surface forest, while all around us white stalks rose like trees, streaked with grey where the outer layers of mushroom "bark" were peeling. Little motes of phosphorescent light twinkled in the air – mushroom spores, sifting down from the giant mushroom caps like a rain of faerie dust.

Entranced, I drifted to the center of the clearing and turned in a circle, taking it all in. "Well, would you look at that," I marveled, and laughed in sheer delight. "I've never been in a mushroom forest before."

Valen watched me explore the grove. "Do you like it?" he asked, his voice almost shy.

I smiled. "I do. It's amazing." I ran the palm of my hand along the bole of a mushroom tree. It felt warm and almost velvety. I wished Drogan could see this. He'd lived to explore the weird and wonderful places of this world. I thought he'd have gotten a real kick out of this one. I wondered if I'd ever stop missing him, or if it would ever stop hurting when I remembered that he was gone. _Probably not_. Thrusting away the familiar clingings of grief, I turned back to Valen. "Not that I'm complaining, but I'm guessing you brought us here for something other than sightseeing."

Valen nodded and straightened, going all professional again. "You would be correct. This farmer worships Eilistraee," he explained crisply. "He has supplied us with food before. I know him to be loyal, reliable, and, above all, discrete."

I frowned. "Fine," I said, and hefted the bottle of lightning in one hand. "But I still don't see what mushrooms have to do with this."

Valen smirked. "Just this – the farmer will tell no one what we do here and will not lament any ruined crops, as long as he is compensated."

Comprehension dawned. "What, you think I should throw lightning at his mushrooms?"

Valen shrugged. "Why not? This place is isolated, safe, and hidden from prying eyes, so you will be able to practice without worrying that someone might see…" He paused. "…something they should not see."

That was a diplomatic way of saying that I wasn't on top of my game and we couldn't let our enemies find out. I supposed I should feel embarrassed that he knew I wasn't at my best, but all I really felt was gratitude. _That's Valen for you. Covering everybody's asses._ Somehow, knowing he had my back made this whole problem seem not-so-bad. Now all I had to do was make sure I could return the favor. "Sounds like a plan," I said, and plucked the lightning jar from its bag. "Let's get to work."

Valen nodded. Something about the set of his shoulders loosened, from full attention to half at ease, as if he was glad his idea had met with my approval. "I am ready when you are."

I didn't think I'd ever be ready for this, but supposed I was as ready as I'd ever be. I gripped the cork of my bottle. "Opening this thing on a count of three," I announced. "You guys might want to duck." Then I counted to three and popped the cork.

The jar hit the ground like a bullet, the air went _crackle-boom_ , and my vision went white.

At first, I thought I'd been struck blind. Then I inhaled, coughed, waved a hand in front of my face, and realized that I could see fine, I was just surrounded by white smoke. "Guys?" I called. "You all right?"

Deekin's voice drifted out of the fog. "No worries, Boss. Deekin never gots to worry about lightning."

"Why? You got a special amulet or something?"

"Nah. Deekin just be naturally low to the ground."

Well, that accounted for Deeks, but what about Valen? He was wearing metal and comfortably over six feet if you counted the horns. My stomach did an anxious little flip-flop. "Valen?" I called through the smoke. "You okay?"

Valen's voice came from about ground level. "Have you ever considered the possibility of _aiming_?"

I began to breathe again. Valen was okay. He sounded too ticked off to be seriously hurt. "I know. I'm sorry. But I _did_ tell you to duck."

"So you did." Something clanked. Silvery-green metal flashed. Valen rose from the receding fog, his expression a little disgruntled. "But I would appreciate it if you were to aim a little higher next time, all the same."

"I will," I promised. I brushed a little mushroom ash off of my armor and wrinkled my nose at the smell of charred fungus. "Okay, so, uh, next question." I picked up the empty lightning jar and waggled it meaningfully. "How do I refill this thing?"

It took a little trial and error, but within a few minutes I was sitting on the ground with the jar in my lap and one hand vigorously rubbing a silk handkerchief up and down Enserric's black-glass blade. _I'm going to get back to the temple,_ I thought. _And the Seer's going to ask me what I did with my day, and I'm going to have to tell her I spent the afternoon jerking off my sword._ If only Xanos could see me now, he'd laugh himself silly. "How long do I have to keep doing this? My wrist is getting tired," I complained, for probably the first time in my life.

Deekin shrugged. "Until there be enough lightning in the bottle for the spell to trigger."

Silk _chiff_ 'ed against glass. Little sparks gathered, and as soon as they did, they zipped into the jar as if pulled by a magnet. "But the bottle's open. Won't the lightning just leak back out?" I asked.

Deekin shook his head. "That not the way the spell works. It holds the lightning until it be full, then it lets it go."

I gritted my teeth and kept rubbing. The sparks kept going in, a couple at a time, but then they just sort of loitered there, as if waiting to be told what to do. "Fine," I said. "I'll know when that hap-" A flash of light came from the jar, and a surge of power made my skin tingle. I wasn't sure how I'd managed to move so fast, but in a twinkling I was crouched on the ground with both hands pressed over the jar's mouth. "-pens," I panted. "Shit. That was close." The lightning bumped against my hand and licked my palm like a puppy begging to be let out. I stood up slowly, keeping my hand glued to the jar and trying really really hard not to think about the fact that I had a kajillion volts of electricity acting like I was its mommy. "Get ready," I cautioned. "I think I can keep it in the jar, but I'm not so sure I can steer it once I let it out." Valen nodded and dropped to the ground like he was about to give me twenty. I took a deep breath. "On a count of three. One. Two…"

This time, when I took my hand away, I kept my fingers cupped around the mouth of the jar and watched the lightning like a hawk watching a mouse.

The lightning shot for the sky, but this time, I was ready for it. My fist closed, stopping the bolt in its tracks, but even so I could feel it bucking and shuddering like a wild horse and it was all I could do to hold on long enough to sight on a mushroom, aim, and give the bolt the ol' heave-ho.

There was a loud, powdery sound, like a dry-rotted pile of timber had just exploded.

A fraction of a second later, a horizontal shower of smelly, smoking little mushroom chunks pelted my armor.

The rain pattered to a stop. I assessed the damage. The mushroom I'd been aiming at had been reduced to a smoking stump. _So where's the rest of it?_ I looked down at myself and sighed. "Damn it. And I just got this armor cleaned, too."

Valen was already standing. He flicked a chunk of mushroom off of his breastplate, the motion crisp with distaste. "So did I."

Guilt, always hovering at my back, took a smart step forward. "I'll pay for Rizolvir to give your armor a good cleaning, how about that?" I offered.

The tiefling looked up, visibly startled and not a little confused. "I thought…" _…you were broke,_ his expression finished.

At least he'd been kind enough not to say it out loud. "Remember how Deekin swiped everything in the Maker's lab that wasn't nailed down?" I supplied. "And then sold it?" I frowned. "Although you weren't there for that last part so I guess you wouldn't remember it."

Valen's expression cleared. "Oh."

"Yeah." I sat cross-legged on the ground and made myself comfortable with sword, jar, and scarf. "Some of it's yours, actually. About…" I tried and failed to make a tally. "What's his portion, Deeks?"

Deekin's voice was a little disgruntled, like he'd been hoping I wouldn't bring this up. "About seven hundred platinum, Boss. Give or take."

"Seriously?" That sounded like a lot. "Did we spend all my portion yet?"

The bard jingled his bag. "No, Boss. We spent a couple hundred platinum, but we still gots two thousand platinum, four hundred and fifty two gold, eight silver, and six copper."

I frowned. After four years in this world, I still had a hard time understanding what stuff was worth – not that things had been any different back home. When you could afford whatever you wanted, you didn't ask about price, and I might be a lot poorer now but old habits were hard to break. "Uh. Okay. What could we get for that?"

The kobold gave me a long-suffering look. "That depends. There be any small countries we wants to buy? We could probably affords a couple."

My heart sank. "Shit. We can't go around with that kind of money. It'll just cause trouble." I bit my lip. "Can't you find something to spend it on?"

The kobold's eyes lit with the gleam of avarice. "Sure, Boss. Deekin can think of a few things," he chirped happily. He paused, looked at me, looked at Valen, sighed, and spoke to Valen in a voice so reluctant you could just _hear_ his feet dragging. "But Deekin could give you your share now if you wants, goa…General."

Valen's expression was the very picture of indifference. "Keep it."

The kobold's voice came out in a squeak. "Keep it? You mean you don't want me to gives it to you?"

The tiefling's voice was exasperated. "The last I checked, that is what 'keep' means, yes."

Deekin persisted. "Why don't you want the money?"

"I have never found much use for it."

Deekin seemed to be stuck on that point, like he was hearing the words but they were in a foreign language and he wasn't sure he'd understood them correctly. "Whaddya mean, you not found much use for money?"

Valen's tone was dismissive. "I have survived this long without it. I see no reason to change that."

"But what about food? Shelter?" Deekin eyed the weapon master's glossy green breastplate. "Armor polish?"

"The Seer sees to my needs," Valen countered, his diction gaining a slight, irritated snap. "Such as they are."

"But money gets you cool stuff!" Deekin argued. "Don't you wants cool stuff, General?"

"No," Valen said flatly. "The more I have, the more I have to lose." His expression went both hard and sad, somehow. "Besides, the things I want most cannot be bought."

Deekin's nostrils flared like he'd just scented a story. "What be those?"

The skies in Valen's eyes were overcast. "I want to know what peace feels like, I want to be a good man, and I want to die that way."

The bard hmph'ed. "You always be this serious?"

"Not always." A faint smile crossed Valen's face, lifting the clouds for just a moment. "But you _did_ ask."

"Yeah, and Deekin kinda wish he hadn't," the kobold grumped.

I glanced up from my sword-rubbing and jar-filling. I didn't like the morose expression that had settled on Valen's face. We needed to ease away from this subject, stat. "The man did just give you all of his money, Deeks," I pointed out. "How about thanking him instead?"

Deekin perked up. "That be true." He showed Valen a happy forest of very pointy teeth. "Thanks, General!"

"You are welcome." Valen's brow furrowed. "I think."

Finally, the jar's spell caught and a fresh lightning bolt kindled. I clapped a belaying hand over the vessel. "Heads up and asses down, boys," I warned. Then, once the boys were safely on the ground, I counted to three and let another lightning bolt go.

The blast thinned out the mushroom herd a little, but that didn't bring me much comfort. I settled on the ground with jar and sword, chewing on my lower lip. "You were right, Deeks." I gestured with Enserric, even as I rubbed a charge back into the black glass blade. "It looks like this thing only gives me one shot – which is better than none, but it means I've got to figure out how to make that shot count."

Valen looked at the obliterated mushrooms. "This does not count?"

A memory came to me – lightning forking from the sky, glass exploding, Heurodis screaming, a city dropping from the sky like a bird taken on the wing. "I can do better than this," I said, my voice quiet. I looked at my hands and flexed my fingers. Had my nails gotten longer? Sharper? Blacker? I couldn't tell. Did it even matter? I was what I was, whether I liked it or not. My jaw tightened, and I looked up, meeting Valen's eyes, wishing he understood and thanking my lucky stars that he didn't, because if he knew what I was capable of, if he _really_ knew the depths of me, he'd be taking all those words of trust back before you could say Jack Robinson. All the same… "I _have_ to do better. But how?"

Valen looked at me for a long moment. Then, so suddenly I almost jumped, he heaved a sigh and settled to the ground, right next to me. "That is a tricky question," he admitted. "But if you would like to hear what I think…"

I looked at him from the corner of my eye. He was sitting with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting lightly on his knees, a pose I might have taken for relaxed if not for the stiff line of his shoulders and the way his eyes never stayed in one place for too long. "I think I would," I said. A little spark of hope kindled in me. Valen was resourceful. He had to be, to survive what he had. Maybe he could come up with something. "Like to hear what you think, I mean."

Valen nodded his thanks for my go-ahead. "Very well. I think you should follow your instincts."

The little spark of hope went out. "If you knew the kind of trouble I've gotten into just by following my instincts, you wouldn't be saying that."

"Actually, Boss, Deekin thinks he gots a point," the kobold interjected. "You gots it all wrong, Boss. You be good at _thinking_ yourself into trouble, but when bad guys come a-knocking and you not gots time to think, you _be_ the trouble."

That gave me pause. If these two were agreeing, there had to be something to what they were saying. A memory flickered. "You know, I had a sorcerer friend who said the same thing," I said thoughtfully. "About following my instincts, I mean."

Deekin cocked his head. "This be mean green man?

Valen looked back and forth between us. "Green man?"

I gave Deekin a long, chiding look, which rolled right off of him. "He's a half-orc, so I guess you could say he's greenish," I conceded. "But he's not actually mean. He's just bitter. The world's been shitting on him since the day he was born, thanks to that whole half-orc thing, so he's gotten into the habit of shitting back."

Valen grunted faintly in understanding. "I cannot say that I blame him."

I studied his profile. It was like looking at a marble bust of Lathander, only the Morninglord's handsome face was always full of youthful optimism, whereas Valen's was old enough to know better. "You don't _act_ all that bitter, though," I observed.

The tiefling shrugged. "The temptation is there," he said matter-of-factly. "But I try not to give in to it. What purpose would it serve? Life is short. Why waste what little time I have making myself miserable about things that I cannot change?"

I smiled. _Now **that's** grace under pressure. _ "You and Xanos should have a talk." I paused, thinking. "Should be pretty interesting, since he won't be able to win any arguments by setting you on fire."

Valen raised an eyebrow. "That seems a strange way to win an argument."

My laugh was tinged with sadness. "Xanos is a strange guy. But a good one, all jokes aside."

Valen looked at my face. "You sound as if you miss him a great deal."

I had to swallow a lump in my throat. "I do. We were pretty close, but I…" _Fucked that friendship up good._ "…I haven't seen him in a while. Not since the Anauroch."

The tiefling looked at me thoughtfully. "Half-orcs, kobolds, drow, and duergar," he mused. "You will befriend all kinds, it seems."

Deekin piped up. "Yeah, Boss not really care about that stuff. She yells at Deekin a lot, but it never because Deekin be a kobold, it because Deekin did something dumb." He grinned his toothy reptilian grin. "Which be fair enough, really, so Deekin got no complaints."

Valen smiled. "I have noticed that about her." He looked at me, and his smile warmed. "Personally, I find it refreshing, to be judged for my actions and not my heritage."

I flushed and shrugged. "I don't see what the big deal is. Everybody's got free will. They don't have to be a certain way just 'cause of...what? Fate? Genetics?" I snorted. "Bullshit. I don't buy that."

"Many people would disagree with you."

"Many people can't tell their asses from their elbows. What's your point?" Valen just laughed at that. I cleared my throat. This was getting embarrassing. I didn't need praise for clearing the low bar of basic human decency. _Time to change the subject._ "Anyway, that's besides the point. The point is that Xanos told me that this…thing I have is kind of like sorcery – all instinct and not much thinking."

Valen shrugged. "Then stop thinking so hard about what you are doing and just do it."

So far that made three people – four, if you counted Drogan – who'd all given me the same advice. "All right, fine," I relented, and stood, straightening my scale vest. "Follow my instincts. Fine."

I took stock.

I had lightning, but I only had one blast, and I had to make it last. How?

A memory came to mind – the Power Source, humming in my hand. I remembered how I'd used the Power Source on the golem that had tried to sneak up on Valen. Power had streamed out of Power Source, and I'd kept the current running, trained on my target.

Well, I didn't have a current here, but I did have power. What if I didn't let it all go at once?

I counted to three and lifted my hand. The lightning leapt, but this time, I was ready for it, and I drew up the power in me and caught the lightning and held it in chains of spirit and thought just as it was surging out of its cage.

We stood there, or at least I stood. The lightning quivered in my fist, impatient as a hound ready for the hunt. Holding that lightning back was like holding on to a tuft of grass at the edge of a cliff by my _teeth,_ but somehow I did it, long enough to sight a row of mushroom trees and let my grip ease _just_ a little, just like that…

Lightning jumped, but I held its leash. A narrow arc of light spasmed in the air between me and the mushroom tree, all white light and black smoke. It wanted to surge, I could feel it, and I hauled back on it for all I was worth, my whole body going taut. The arc bucked in my hand but it _held_ , thank Shaundakul, it held.

The taste of metal filled my mouth. My stomach clenched like a fist, my heart pounded, my skin tingled, and my entire body _burned_ , like the lightning itself was in my blood.

I turned to the next tree. _Go,_ I thought, and fed a little more slack to my leashed lightning, and wonder of wonders it _went_ , leaping joyfully from the first tree to the second.

I turned. _Go,_ I thought, and another arc, weaker than the first two but still there, jumped to the third tree. Then a fourth arc, fainter still, and a fifth, barely there, and then…

The lightning fizzled with a final sputter and a hiss. I lowered my hands, suddenly realizing that I was sweating bullets. "Fuck," I gasped. My legs gave out. I dropped to the ground, the jar falling from my shaking hands. "That…wasn't…easy."

Valen knelt next to me. "Are you all right?"

I struggled to catch my breath. I could only wheeze out words a couple at a time. "That felt…like wrestling…a live…anaconda." I wiped the forehead with the back of my hand, looked at the wetness on my skin, and made an 'ick' face. "And I look…like I fell...in a lake."

"Ah...somewhat, perhaps." There was a pause. Leather creaked and metal clinked. Then a waterskin appeared in front of my face, held in a pale hand. "Here."

I reached out, grasped the skin with both hands, gasped a, "Thanks," and drank. I felt like I'd lost about twenty pounds in water weight alone.

Valen watched me gulp down water like a bluefin tuna. "Are you up to another attempt?"

I lowered the skin. "Honestly? No." The sweat was cooling on my skin, making me shiver. "But I think I'm gonna have to be." I realized that I was slumping over my knees. I tried to straighten. I failed. "Just…give me a minute. I need to catch my breath."

Valen nodded. "Of course," he said. Then he smiled a little. "The mushrooms are not going anywhere."

"Unless they be myconids," Deekin spoke up happily. "Myconids move lots."

I looked up nervously. "How do you tell the difference, anyway?"

Valen looked up, too. "In my experience?"

I took another long swig of water. "Hmm?"

"If it tries to kill you, it is probably not a normal mushroom."

I spluttered. Water ran down my chin. I wiped it off. "Thanks. You're so helpful."

He flashed me a grin. "You are welcome."

I shook my head and busied myself with dabbing water off of my armor, still chuckling intermittently. He really did have a sense of humor, although it was an iceberg sense of humor – most of it was hidden and what wasn't hidden was still hard to see, so you never knew it was there until you ran smack into it and it sank you like a stone.

We sat in silence while I drank and tried to talk myself into wrestling with the anaconda again. _Come on, girl_. _You've run marathons. More than marathons – you've run across the Sword Coast and back. You can do this._

Eventually, I ran out of water and started to feel a little energy trickle back into my limbs. I pictured a red-gloved hand holding a knife, and forced myself to pick up the lightning jar. "All right," I said wearily, and tugged my silk kerchief out of my belt again. "Back to work."

* * *

I lay spread-eagled and stared up at the underside of a city street. I could see it clearly. This was because most of the mushroom canopy was gone. "Stick a fork in me," I said to the sky, or what passed for sky down here. "I'm done."

Next to me, Valen twisted around so he could survey the damage. A ring of smoking, blackened mushroom stumps surrounded us, littered with fallen trunks where the wind had knocked them over. The place looked like a faerie circle after a blitzkrieg. "I cannot see much more for you _to_ do," he remarked. "You have run out of targets." He turned back to me. "You seem to have a knack for destruction."

I grimaced. "Yeah," I mumbled. A hazy dream-image rose – a bolt of lightning in a bloody hand. And what was it Enserric had said? That he was a weapon with the soul of a man, but I was a woman with the soul of a weapon? Exhaustion turned me frank. "I guess Shaundakul decided he needed a weapon, so he turned me into one."

Valen cocked his head. "Turned you into one? How so?"

The under-the-overpass view wasn't much to look at. My head lolled to one side. A muscular thigh, clad in beaten-up black leather, came into focus. _Much better_. "He touched me," I explained wearily. My hand rose to touch a spot in the exact center of my forehead. "Here. When we first met. After that…I wasn't the same." My hand went to the spot above my heart. "After that, I started doing things like…" I gestured at the smoking wreckage around us. "…this."

Valen nodded slowly. "So you _are_ god-touched. That explains a great deal." His eyes on me were uncomfortably penetrating, like he was picking up pieces of me, turning them around, starting to see where they fit into the bigger picture. "I have heard of mortals like you before."

I went still. "'Mortals like me'? Like me in what way?"

"Mortal proxies," the tiefling answered. "Some call them god-blessed. Others, god-cursed." He picked up a mushroom fragment and studied it, turning it over and over in his pale fingers in a way that, if I hadn't known better, I'd have called 'anxious'. "They are mortals whose nature aligns so closely with their god's nature, or at least with certain aspects of it, that they come to embody a portion of their god's power. Some even believe that they are an extension of their god's will - divine hands at arm's length." He looked at me somberly. "If that is what you are, I do not envy you."

The man who'd gotten dragged down to the Abyss didn't envy me? Well, if that wasn't enough to make me soil my britches, nothing was. "Why not?"

"Because your kind, like mine, seldom live to see old age." Valen's voice was even quieter than usual. "You said it yourself – Shaundakul turned you into a weapon. Weapons exist to be used."

I was already shaking my head. "Shaundakul wouldn't use me." He wouldn't hurt me. "Not like that."

Valen shrugged. "Nonetheless." His tone suggested that _he_ wasn't so sure that Shaundakul had my best interests at heart. "Proxies are called to action by their god, or perhaps driven to it by their own nature, just as a tiefling's chaotic nature draws us to conflict and bloodshed. It is not a lifestyle conducive to an easy existence. Or a long one."

A heavy feeling settled in my chest. "Did you ever meet any in person?" I asked, already dreading the answer. "The ones like me, I mean."

Valen hesitated a few heartbeats before answering. "One. He was a mortal proxy of Erythnul. We fought together in a skirmish near the headwaters of the Styx."

 _The Styx._ This must have been somewhere in the Hells, then. Even I had heard of the Styx, in the old myths back home – the river that dead souls had to cross to get to Hell. I hadn't heard of that other stuff, though. "Who's Erythnul?"

"A Power – a god, as you would put it – of war, hatred, and indiscriminate slaughter," Valen explained. Then, with his typical dry understatement, he added, "Not the most pleasant of figures."

"You don't say," I returned, just as drily. Finding a little 'oomph' somewhere, I flailed my way back to a sitting position. Nearby, Deekin's quill scratched over paper. We were being recorded, but I didn't have the energy to make an issue of it. "So what was his proxy doing in…where in the Abyss was this, anyway?"

"Pandesmos," Valen clarified. "The largest layer of Pandemonium, which is an endless maze of caverns filled with howling winds that can drive visitors mad in moments. All who reside there are permanently, utterly, and often violently mad."

I snorted. "It's also where you said I'm from."

A blush climbed the tiefling's cheeks. "That was my temper speaking. I did not actually mean it." He cleared his throat. "I apologize."

Watching him blush was an experience. I could actually _see_ the blood creep up from his neck to his cheekbones in real-time, spreading like spilled ink in a bathtub _._ "It's okay," I reassured him. "You're not the first person to call me crazy."

Valen shook his head. "You are not crazy," he argued. Then he paused, seemed to think for a second, and added: "A little maddening sometimes-"

I huffed in fake indignation. "Oh, _really._ Like when?"

Valen's face went pained, and his tail thumped against the loam. "Like when you interrupt me in the middle of a sentence. For example."

That brought me up short. "Oops. I kind of did, didn't I?"

"No. You did. There was no 'kind of'."

I grinned shamefacedly. "Sorry. I won't do it again. Promise."

One corner of Valen's mouth lifted. "Do not make promises you cannot keep."

I laughed. "All right. How about I'll _try_ not to do it again?"

The other corner of his mouth went up, joining the first. "That sounds a little more realistic." He paused, a slightly helpless expression crossing his face. "Ah, Hells. And now I have lost my train of thought. Where were we?"

I eyed his left horn – the one that had a chip missing out of it – and wondered exactly how many times he'd been hit in the head, because for such a clever guy he sure forgot things a lot. "Pandesmos, with a proxy," I reminded him.

Valen straightened, blinking. "Right. Pandesmos." He looked down, seeming to marshal his thoughts. "The proxy had been sent by his god to ally with Grimash't's forces. That is not unusual - the more warlike and malevolent Powers often ally with the tanar'ri. They revel in the chaos and bloodshed which demonic troops leave in their wake, even more so than the baatezu, who are no less cruel but are, shall we say, subtler in their depravities." He paused, remembering. "The proxy met our forces shortly before an uridezu – a rat-demon, one of the lowest of the low among demon-kin – came to us with a message. A powerful malebranche who had once defeated Grimash't on the field had recently been sighted gating into Pandesmos, not far from where we were, after his own forces had been decimated in the shadows of Khin-Oin."

Well, whatever I'd expected when I came here, it wasn't a session of Story Time from Hell, but if Valen wanted to talk, I didn't mind listening. He was pretty nice to listen to. "Khin-Oin? What's Khin-Oin?"

"Khin-Oin is called the Wasting Tower, and lies in the center of the Gray Waste." He looked at me, visibly gauged my level of confusion, found it all the way up at 'high', and added, "The Gray Waste is a world of neverending apathy and gloom." His face darkened. "It is also one of the major staging grounds for the Blood War."

The question tripped off my tongue before I could stop it. "Were you there a lot? The Gray Waste, I mean."'

Valen frowned at his hands. "I…think so. Though I cannot…entirely remember."

I bit my lip. "Is that what the Gray Waste does?" I asked tentatively. "Make it so you can't remember?"

"No. That is what the Blood War does." Valen's voice was heavy. "I have holes in my memory that you could drive a herd of rothé through."

 _Fuck._ "I'm sorry."

Valen shrugged. "It is what it is."

The man had probably lost years of his life to the Abyss, and now it seemed he'd lost a few brain cells, too. There really was no justice in the universe. "Aren't there any good memories?" I found myself asking, in spite of my better judgment and Deekin's scratching quill.

A strange, melancholy smile crossed Valen's face. "A few." He looked away, though not before some deep sadness rimmed his eyes and weighed the corners of his mouth down. Then he took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. "Regardless. This proxy had been sent to aid in the slaughter, and to the slaughter he raced, nearly costing us the advantage of surprise in his fecklessness. " His frown deepened. "I was sure he would die that day, but somehow, he survived that battle – that one, and others after it, a mortal man not only leading demons to war but winning, against all odds." His voice turned pensive. "He gathered followers to him, that one – some because they were lured by the chaos he left in his wake, some because he himself was strangely compelling in his madness, and others..." The tiefling laughed shortly, humorlessly. "Others out of mere curiosity. They wanted to see what calamity he would engender next."

This was not turning out to be a flattering comparison. "Is that why you're here?" I asked, half-outraged and half-amused. "Because you're curious what kind of mess I'll get into next?"

"Yes, and no," Valen said, proving once and for all that he didn't fear _anything_ , including the punch in the nose I was close to giving him for that statement. Then he mollified me somewhat by adding, "In most respects, you are nothing like him. The god-touched are as many and varied as the gods they follow, and while you may be many things, cruel you most definitely are not." The tiefling looked at me sidelong. "But you _do_ appear to be a magnet for strange events, just as he was."

My voice was dry. "You're telling me." My life since I'd found that portal in the park had been nothing but a series of increasingly strange events, until now here I was, sitting in a mushroom grove in an underground city full of beautiful sociopaths, talking to a tiefling about Hell while a kobold novelist took notes and I shot lightning out of a yogurt jar. If I could go back to my past self and warn her what was ahead of her, she'd probably pepper spray me and call the funny farm. "But I still don't see what makes you think I'm one of these proxies," I argued. "Shaundakul's hardly a war god." My frown twisted. "And I'm hardly that special."

Valen shrugged. "Many gods choose to share their power with mortals, not just war gods," he said dismissively. "And those mortals they choose are not necessarily special in any way but in their affinity for their god. They do not need to be particularly intelligent, or strong, or skilled, or even very wise. They simply need to follow their instincts." He paused. His ears turned slightly pink. "I, ah, apologize. That did not come out as I intended. I did not mean to imply that you were unintelligent or lacked skill."

"But you did mean to say I was a foolish wimp?" I asked tartly. "Great. Thanks for the clarification."

Deekin spoke up. "Oh, come on, Boss," he griped. "That not be what goa…what the General meant, and you know it."

I damn near fell over, and I was already sitting. "What?"

Deekin rolled his eyes. "All he be saying is that you got enough in common with Shaundakul that Shaundakul be okay with giving you power, 'cause it not like you gonna do anything with it that he wouldn't do."

I turned to Valen. "Is that really what you're saying?"

The tiefling shrugged. "More or less."

I'd never thought about it that way. Then again, Shaundakul had called me _one of his kind_ , back when he'd given me this power in the first place. Maybe it _wasn't_ any more complicated than that. I wasn't smart. I wasn't skilled. I wasn't _special_. I was just…the _same_.

There wasn't much air down here, but there was enough to feel it brush against my cheek, like fingers. I touched my cheek, chasing that wisp of feeling, even as it faded. _You're there, aren't you?_ I could feel his presence behind me, like my own shadow – easy to forget, easy to lose sight of, but always _there_.

Valen's eyes panned over my face. "Are you all right?"

I drew in a sharp breath, then shook myself. "Fine. Just thinking."

Valen looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "A green for your thoughts?"

It took me a few seconds to make sense of that. "Don't you mean a penny?"

"A copper," Deekin supplied. "A copper for your thoughts. That be how it goes."

Valen tilted his head. "Here, perhaps," he said. "But in Sigil, between the corrupting touch of fiends and the corrosive air of the lower Wards, copper never stays copper for long."

Deekin made a 'blech' face. "The air turns copper _green_? Gross."

Between the man-eating puddles, an apparently infinite number of ways to commit "suicide", and now, a stank so rank that it corroded metal, the Hive made the Athkatlan slums sound like a little slice of heaven. "Maybe I'll start with the Merchant's Ward, when I visit," I mused. "Save the Hive for when I'm feeling really brave."

Valen chuckled. "A wise decision. The Merchant's Ward is safer by far, for a Prime like you - as long as you have a savvy and trustworthy guide, anyway."

I looked at him and grinned and nudged his arm with my elbow. "Well, then, I guess it's lucky for me that I do."

Valen blinked. "Who?" He looked around as if he thought maybe I was talking about some _other_ tiefling who'd grown up in the Cage. When any failed to materialize, he looked back at me, his face going almost slack with surprise. "Me?"

"Sure. Why not?" The idea had come to me on an impulse, but now that it was in my head, it seemed like an awfully good one. "You're not bad company, and you know your way around, so you can make sure I don't get mugged. Or stabbed. Or sucked into any mud puddles."

Valen stared at me, his blue eyes wide. "Ooze puddles," he corrected, but he said it in an absent-minded way, like his mouth was running on automatic while his brain was stalled.

I shrugged one shoulder. "Whatever. So how about it?" I remembered how longingly he'd looked at that map in the library, like he was making a list in his head of all the places he wanted to see, and how his fingers had lingered especially long on the shorelines. Without thinking, I put one hand on the ground and leaned in towards him, lowering my voice conspiratorially. "Tell you what. I'll even sweeten the deal. If we survive this, we'll celebrate - I'll take you to see the ocean, and then _you_ can take me to see Sigil. How about it?"

Valen kept staring. Then one corner of his lips went up, then the other, and then he was smiling, smiling so broadly that it chased all the lines of tension from his face and lit up his baby blues like sunlight on the sea. "I…think I might like that," he murmured, his voice as low as mine.

I stared back. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. I had never noticed that before. How had I not noticed it? How was he even doing that? The man had been through literal Hell. By rights, the Abyss should have burned the smiles out of him, torn them up by the roots and salted the earth where they grew. How, then, could he still smile so much like a goddamn angel?

I stared, and gradually, a few observations began to percolate through the cotton candy and dandelion fluff my brain suddenly seemed to have turned into.

One: I was smiling, too, and it was the goofiest damn smile I'd ever worn while not actively out of my mind on drugs.

Two: There was an awfully familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, halfway between a knot and a flutter.

Three: I couldn't seem to stop looking at him, although really, there were some things a woman couldn't reasonably be expected to do, and taking her eyes from a face like _that_ was one of them.

Four: I was leaning _way too close._

Five: I wasn't leaning nearly as close as I wanted to.

Way too late, my brain ran a highlight reel of the recent past, added it all up, wrote the sum down in bright red ink, and waved it in front of my face while jumping up and down and screaming.

I stared into Valen's bright blue eyes, the realization of what was happening hitting me like…

…well, kind of like a lightning bolt.

 _Oh, **fuck**._


	42. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

_A/N: Cookies for everybody, either because you guessed right or you came up with some good comedy options. Also, you all rock and should be given cookies just on general principle._

So, cookies for all, and for all a new chapter!

* * *

 _I'm wild again,  
_ _Beguiled again,  
_ _A simpering, whimpering child again -  
_ _Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I._

\- Lorenz Hart, "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered""

 _All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why._

\- James Thurber

~*~  
Chapter 42: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered  
~*~

I put my back to my bedroom door and stared at the far wall, both hands clapped over my mouth and my eyes bugging. " _Fuck_."

The past hour or so had passed in a haze. My little moment of clarity had stricken the words right from my throat. Going by the others' reactions, I must have looked like I was about to faint. I'd sure _felt_ that way.

Somehow, I didn't know how, I'd managed to pass it off as exhaustion from all the lightning-slinging. Valen had bought my excuse and ferried me back to the temple. He'd fussed a little and left me alone to rest, though not without making sure my door was well-guarded so I could rest easy, because of course he had. He was a good person who looked after his friends. "Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck."

Deekin crouched next to me. "Uh. You okay, Boss? You not look so good, and you not usually repeat yourself this much when you curse."

I pressed my palms to my burning cheeks. "This isn't happening," I warbled. "This _can't_ be happening."

Red light rippled over the black marble like a wavefront. "I was wondering when the penny would drop," Enserric said, with a certain spiteful satisfaction. "I confess, I have been quite looking forward to this moment."

Bewilderment pulled out ahead of my shock. It had to shove the pedal to the metal to do it. "Wha-"

"I had no idea existence as a sword could provide such entertainment," Enserric interrupted jovially. "Watching you grope towards insight is rather like watching a goblin compose a symphony."

I stared at the sword in horror, then buried my face in my hands. _Am I the only idiot who didn't see this coming?_ "Oh, Hells."

Deekin spoke up. "This be about the General, isn't it?"

Well, that answered _that_ question. My scales scraped against mushroom fiber as I slid to the floor with my back against the door and my face in my hands. "Oh, god."

"What be wrong, Boss? You can't be angry at him. You been acting way too friendly for that. Matter of fact, you been acting like…" The bard paused. His voice took a turn towards deepening suspicion. "Waaaait. Boss, you was lying when you said you not likes goat-man, wasn't you?"

 _Oh, fuck._ In desperation, I reverted to press automaton mode. "I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of that allegation."

Deekin wasn't fooled. "Right. So you _do_ likes him." He paused again. "Matter of fact, you not just likes him. You _likes_ him likes him, don't you, Boss?"

That got me to squint-glare at Deekin through my fingers. "I _like_ him like him? What are we, twelve?"

"Thirteen, actually."

Sheer surprise made my hands fall. "Come again?"

"Deekin be thirteen years old." He looked at the expression on my face and explained with gentle patience. "Kobolds not live as long as humans, Boss. The oldest kobold Deekin ever heard of was ol' Tiktak, who made it all the way to forty-two before old Boss stepped on him." The little bard scratched his armpit thoughtfully. "It not be so bad, though – we be hatched already walkings and talkings, and we grows up real fast. Not like you pinkskins, where you stays little and useless for ages and ages."

I was never going to complain about elven lifespans again. "No wonder you're in such a hurry to be a famous kobold bard," I said weakly.

Deekin grinned toothily. "Yep. Deekin not gotta lotta time to make his mark on the world." The bard snapped his fingers, the sound dry and a little raspy, like the very start of a rattlesnake's rattle. "He gotta move fast, chop-chop, toot-sweet." He looked at my face again, and his expression softened. "It be okay, Boss. Really. Deekin already seen lotsa stuff no kobold ever seen before, and done lotsa stuff no kobold ever done before, and it all be thanks to Boss. Deekin never would've been brave enough to leave kobold caves in the first place, if not for you."

I swallowed a lump in my throat. I had to get this little guy out of here alive. I had to. "If I have any say in it, Deeks, you're gonna outlive old Tiktak," I swore, my voice hoarse. "You hear me?"

Deekin's grin softened to just a hint of teeth. "Deekin hears you, Boss." Then he cocked his head and gave me a very direct stare. "But you not getting away from answering Deekin's question that easy. You likes goat-man, don't you?"

My face felt like it was putting out more heat than a live coal. Deekin was right. I did like Valen. I liked talking to him. He was a good conversationalist and had lots of interesting things to say. I liked looking at him. He looked like what would happen if Sune and Lathander had a love child. I admired him. He'd been through so much, and he'd come out of it so good and so not-totally-insane. But how the hell had we gotten here from where we started?

 _Well, let's review,_ answered a little voice in my head. It sounded like me, only even snider. _He's sweet, he's funny, he's sexy, he's smart, he's tough, he's talented, and he acts like a grown-up. Most of the time, anyway. Oh, and he likes long walks on the beach. Need I go on?_

I couldn't argue with myself. A, I was right, and B, only crazy people argued with themselves, and I was probably losing my mind but I didn't think I was all the way there. Yet.

And, okay, Valen had his downsides – he was moody, sensitive, hot-headed, and probably had a case of post-traumatic stress that made 'nam flashbacks look like a walk in the park. But then I thought of his eyes – the bluest damn eyes I'd ever seen, as clear and bright and scorching as a late summer sky – and all I could do was wonder what it would take to make those baby blues go all crinkly at the corners again.

I realized what I was thinking almost as soon as I was thinking it, but too late to stop myself from thinking it. _Aaaand I'm in trouble now._ I put my face in my hands again and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes to keep myself from crying. "Shoot me."

I could feel the kobold's eyes on me, even if I couldn't see them. "O-kay. Now Deekin be confused. You not hates the General after all, and he not hates you. Everything be hunky-dory now. What gots Boss so upset?"

I let my hands fall to my lap. "This wasn't supposed to _happen_ , Deeks." I could hear the panic in my voice. "This is the wrong time, wrong place, wrong person, _wrong everything_."

"Dunno, Boss. The way you been smiling at goa…at the General, it not look so wrong to Deekin."

"It is!" I swallowed, looked at the door, and lowered my voice. "It's just going to complicate things. I don't _need_ complications." I was caught up in a war in a dangerous place that I barely knew, conspiracies were swirling all around me, an insanely powerful archmage had laid a geas on me, I probably still had assassins hunting me, and I only had a handful of allies I could trust to watch my back, at best. "My life's already complicated enough."

The kobold cocked his head, studying me his sparrow's eyes. "If you say so, Boss."

His tone said he didn't understand, and I didn't know how to explain it any better than I had. Nonetheless, I tried. "You've gotta understand, Deeks. There's so much going on…so much to worry about. I can't…"

The bard waited for me to go on, then, when I didn't, he prompted me gently. "You can't what?"

The words burst out of me as a wail. "I can't deal with this, too! Not on top of everything else!" Then I buried my face in my hands, and this time I couldn't keep myself from crying. I knew I was being childish, but I couldn't help it. It was too much. It was all just too much.

Claws scraped and scales rustled. It sounded like the kobold had just made himself more comfortable. Maybe he'd decided he'd better sit down, because this was obviously going to take a while. "Deekin not sure why you be so surprised," he opined. "It been pretty obvious which way the wind be blowings. Obvious to Deekin, anyway."

I hiccoughed and sniffled and turned my head a little, squinting through a sliver of space between my fingers. "Huh? Since when?"

Enserric spoke up. "Oh, I do not know. Perhaps it was that time when you halted an entire golem regiment so that you could engage in a little light public flirtation?"

I jerked upright, scrubbing angrily at my tear-streaked face. "We weren't _flirting_ , we were _arguing_."

"Arguing?" The sword's snort was derisive. "Ha! More like yowling at one another like a pair of amorous felines."

My stomach dropped to somewhere around the core of the planet. "Holy shit. You're right." I'd been having a little too much fun bickering with Valen and…and _teasing_ Valen and provoking Valen into silly arguments, and the reason why it had been so much fun was because I hadn't been _arguing_ , I'd been _flirting_. Only I'd either had so many other things on my mind or I'd been so deep in denial – or maybe it was a bit of both - that it hadn't really registered until now.

The next thought to strike me chilled my blood even as it made my heart beat faster. _And Valen?_ What had _he_ been doing while I'd been making a spectacle of myself? Had he been flirting back?

I thought back desperately, poring over every detail of our interactions that I could recall. He'd definitely warmed up to me since we first met, but that didn't mean much, given that he'd started out ice-cold. Plus, well, he hadn't done any of the things I'd _expect_ of a man who had romance on the mind. He hadn't touched me unless he absolutely had to, hadn't made any suggestive comments, hadn't given me any come hither glances or naughty smirks or even, for that matter, much in the way of smiles. Sure, he'd given me more smiles so far than he normally seemed to give most people, but he smiled at the Seer and Imloth, too, so it was entirely possible we were just friends in his mind. And he _had_ seemed a little stunned by that golden getup Imloth had put me in last night, but so had everybody else who'd looked at me in the right light. That thing had been shinier than a paladin's codpiece.

My mind ran in circles until, hopelessly confused, I gave up and slumped backwards. "What am I going to do?"

Enserric snorted. "Well, whatever you do, do not look to me for advice. I was terrible at this sort of thing in life, and death has not improved me."

"Hah. And you think I'm any better?"

A fluttering, stuttering sensation in my brain told me that Enserric had gone rifling through my memories again. When he spoke, his voice was surprised. "Gracious. I stand corrected. My own ill luck with the opposite sex was quite a low bar to clear, but you, my wielder, appear to have successfully tunneled beneath it."

I couldn't say he was wrong. My track record with men was more like a trail of destruction. Public scenes, hate sex, revenge sex, _bad_ sex, bitter breakups, dysfunction, drama, and bad decisions – been there, done that, sometimes more than once.

Most recently, there'd been Samar, the one Mags had called my "pretty ranger" in Everlund. We'd met on the road, and he had, indeed, been pretty – a sun-bleached, sun-tanned blond with deep blue eyes and the lean, fit body of a professional outdoorsman. We'd met and started exchanging looks right off the bat, and since he didn't have any obvious personality defects and I didn't have anyone better to do, it was only a matter of days before we had our hands down each other's pants and tongues down each other's throats. That went on until the less obvious personality defects started creeping up on me, such as his disinterest in any activities beyond fucking and fighting and his inability to talk about anyone but himself. To top it all off, I'd have thought a ranger would have no interest in settling down, but he'd been all about white picket fences, planning out where we'd live and how many kids we'd have and despite having eaten my cooking he _still_ expected me to feed him. By the time he'd started whining about all the time I spent roaming the earth with "misfits" and "wastrels" instead of playing house with him, I'd high-tailed it out of there so fast I'd left him talking to my dust.

Then there was Robert. _Ooh_ , yeah, there was Robert – vain, vindictive Robert, with the ice-gray eyes and curly black hair and pouty lower lip that I'd once enjoyed kissing. Unfortunately, he'd been one of those men who thought that as long as he _looked_ good in bed, he didn't need to actually _be_ good. That, by itself, wouldn't even have been a deal-breaker as long as he was willing to learn, but he wasn't, so I wasn't willing to stick around. Unfortunately, I hadn't actually _told_ him that. Not as such. I'd just ghosted on him because I didn't want to deal with the drama. That had been a miscalculation, since I hadn't avoided the drama, just postponed it, and when it finally came, it took my career down with it. I still didn't know whether I'd broken his heart or just his ego, but either way, credit where credit was due - Robert had gotten his revenge.

 _Who else, who else…oh. Tom. Right. Tom._ Daddy had usually made a point of hiring only the ugliest motherfuckers on the planet for my personal detail, but he must have been distracted when he hired Tom, because Tom had been tall and auburn-haired and chiseled and, about a month after he was hired, routinely guarding my body from _way_ closer than was stipulated in his contract. Which, of course, got him fired without a reference as soon as Daddy found out. I should have known better – sure, it took two to tango, but I knew damn well that if our relationship came out, which it inevitably would, it wouldn't be me who'd suffer my father's wrath. Daddy never could raise his voice to me. Everybody _else_ , on the other hand, was fair game. The responsible, sane thing for me to do would have been to keep my distance, for Tom's sake. But I hadn't, because I had been neither responsible nor sane. And that was a shame, because Tom had actually been a good guy. He'd deserved better than me.

 _Oh, and speaking of indecent, there's always Jeff_. But my old college buddy didn't really count, because our relationship, if you wanted to call it that, had lasted for all of one drunken night, after which we had mutually agreed that we should never repeat the experience or in fact speak of that night again. Unlike most of my mistakes, he and I had even stayed pretty good friends - up until my life fell to pieces and Jeff made it clear that he'd do many things for me, but crossing my stepmom's lawyers wasn't one of them. In hindsight I couldn't even blame him. I'd been a mess. He'd been better off steering clear.

And then there were all the others – a parade of faces and bodies and hands and mouths and cocks, some which I still liked to remember when I was alone at night, some I hardly remembered at all, and some I wished I could forget.

All that said, though, there was one dumb mistake I'd never made: I'd never slept with a coworker. It was my one unbroken rule. I'd seen what happened when people broke it. Business deals had gone up in flames. Partnerships had fallen apart because things had gotten too personal. I didn't know what would happen to a war effort like this one if a similar flame-out happened in the leadership ranks, but I didn't think I wanted to find out.

Eventually, I sighed and rubbed my hands over my face. "No," I murmured into my hands, then let them fall again. I was a grown woman. I'd been on this merry-go-round many times before, and while I was a fool for drifting into the ticket line without realizing what I was doing, I'd have to be a bigger fool to actually mount this _particular_ pony. Too much was at stake. Determination restored a little rigor to my spine. "I'll just have to keep a lid on it. Act like a responsible adult, for once in my life. We can't afford another mess."

Deekin rested his chin on his hand, watching me. "What makes you think this gonna be a mess?"

I grimaced. "Experience." I took a deep breath and stood. "I'll just have to keep my distance, that's all. Show a little self-control." I adjusted my armor so it hung nice and neat and straight. _I'll just do what I need to, and then I'll get on with my li…_

Another memory hit, belatedly. My eyes widened. _Shit_. I really had said that thing about taking him to see the ocean, hadn't I? That had been stupid. Deeply, almost _unfathomably_ stupid. Now, if we actually lived through this, he'd be expecting us to take a road trip. Alone. Just the two of us. Day and night. We'd have to camp. There would be moonlit glades, secluded beaches…

I wavered briefly, then, with an effort, rallied. _Well, with any luck, we'll be dead before it becomes an issue. Or he'll just forget._

Relaxing again, I leaned back against the door. I was cool. I was calm. I was collected. I could do this. _Yeah._ I could totally do this.

A fist pounded on the door.

Before I knew it, I had one hand on Enserric's hilt, the other around Deekin's shoulders, and I was facing the door, the carpets stuttering and bunching across the floor as I yanked in air from all around me.

Deekin looked up at me, raising his scaly eyebrows. "Jumpy much, Boss?"

I scowled down at him. "You'll thank me when you're older - and still alive." Warily, still holding air, I crossed to the door and wrenched it open.

A drow was standing just outside. She was tall, short-haired, and unsmiling. Quarra looked at me . "You," the scout leader said, and jerked her head. "Come."

I stared at her. Gradually, I relaxed my grip on the air. Quarra's hair rippled a little in the sudden breeze. "Wait. You can _talk_?"

Quarra gave me a blank look. "Yes."

Okay, so maybe that had been a stupid question, given that she'd been talking when I asked it. "So why didn't you talk before?"

Quarra's red eyes were hooded. "Don't like it." She paused, then added, "Or you."

 _Ah. There's that drow subtlety again._ "Really? Wow." Most people liked me, or if they didn't, they were polite enough not to say it to my face. "But I'm such a charming person," I went on, and gave her the patented Blumenthal smile – the end result of generations of breeding and tens of thousands of dollars in dental work. "Why don't you like me?"

Quarra shot me a scathing glance. "You talk too much."

She had me there. My smile sagged as I followed her into the hall. We didn't go far – a couple steps in, Quarra halted abruptly and pointed. "Here," she grunted. "You like talking. You talk to it."

The hall felt unusually crowded. It took me a second to realize that this was because it was occupied by somebody who was unusually large. I looked up a length of hulking red-black flesh to meet bright orange eyes. "Oh, hi, Mhaat." So he was the 'it' Quarra wanted me to talk to. "How's it going?"

The demon-flesh golem gave me a cordial nod. He was holding something colorful, although his hand engulfed the object so thoroughly I couldn't tell what it was. "Hello, Rebecca Blumenthal. How is what going?"

"Oh, you know." I waved my hand airily. "Just everything. In general."

Mhaat's frown deepened. "Error. I do not know everything, so how can I know how everything is going?"

Why was it that every time I talked to a golem, I wished I hadn't? "It's just a way of asking how you are, Mhaat. Try not to overthink it."

Mhaat brightened. "Oh! I understand. It is a greeting ritual. How delightful!" He gave me a short bow. Something squawked. "I will now return your greeting in kind. Hello, Rebecca Blumenthal. How is it going?"

"Can't complain." _Because you wouldn't understand what I was talking about anyway._ I looked around, wondering where that squawk had come from. My searching gaze fell on the golem's hand and the object in it. There was a tuft of bright yellow feathers sticking out from between his fingers. I looked more closely. "Um. Is it just me, or is that a parrot you're holding?"

Mhaat looked down at his hand, then back up at me, his face a picture of earnest confusion. "Is it? I do not know what it is. I found it flying above the temple." He thrust his hand at me, parrot and all. There was another muffled squawk, and a feathered head thrust from the cage of Mhaat's fingers. It looked around wildly, beak opening and closing as if looking for something to bite. "I thought that perhaps it needed help," Mhaat added. "Therefore, I decided to take it to the Seer."

The penny dropped. I raised a hand, pointing. "I recognize that parrot!" I yelled. "That's a Vharzyym parrot!"

Mhaat held the parrot up to eye level and inspected it with interest. "Do you mean that this beast was sent by a drow?" he asked, his voice dismayed. "Then perhaps I should not keep it, if my keeping it will make our drow friends angry." He relaxed his grip a little, as if preparing to make good on his words…

…and that was when the parrot, halfway free and completely pissed, finally found something to sink its beak into and bit the golem's finger clean off.

Demon-flesh thumped to the floor. Mhaat stared down at the stump where his finger used to be. "Oh." The golem held up his hand. The blood was dark and red, almost indistinguishable from his skin except for the whole gushing thing. "Internal Memorandum: Parrots are not friendly entities."

All hell broke loose.

The parrot shot free of the golem's grip and down the hall in a mad whirl of color, a rush of wings, and a high-pitched scream that sounded remarkably humanoid and remarkably pissed off. Drow scattered, diving into doorways or for the floor.

I looked at the commotion down the hall, looked at Mhaat, danced from foot to foot uncertainly, then made up my mind and yanked a roll of bandages from my belt o' tricks. "Hold still," I ordered, and tied a rushed and sloppy tourniquet around his hand, then folded his other hand over it. "Keep pressure on it. Wait right there." Then I dashed down the hall.

Quarra had already rolled back to her feet, and now she stood staring after the parrot, who'd come to a stop on a marble plinth about twenty feet further down the corridor. " _Vith,_ " she spat, and reached for one of those tiny hand crossbows drow seemed to favor.

I laid a hand on her arm. "Wait!"

Quarra spared me a scowl. "What? Why?"

"Vharzyym sent that thing." I was almost positive I'd seen that same parrot perched on the green-and-gold lady's shoulder, and I doubted anyone who'd gone to the trouble of catching such an exotic pet would just let it wander off at random. Besides, there was a message tube on the parrot's leg, like a carrier pigeon. This parrot was here on a mission. "This might be an attack, but it might also be another message. Don't shoot the messenger."

Quarra studied the parrot a moment longer, then lowered her weapon. "Fine. What now?"

I straightened my armor and considered the scene. "Let me talk to it."

Quarra gave me a funny look. "Talk?"

I shrugged. "I'm good with birds." Shaundakul and flying creatures went together like peanut butter and jelly, and he'd talked birds into helping me out before, so why not now?

I walked slowly down the hall until I was standing at arm's length from the bird. It didn't seem any more fussed by this than by anything else, so I lifted my holy symbol over my head and held it out so the bird could see it. "Here you go." I thought about what to say, then added, hopefully, "Polly wanna cracker?"

The parrot stopped grumbling to itself and studied my holy symbol, cocking its head first one way and then the other. Then its beak darted forward, and before I could react, it had snatched the holy symbol right out of my hand and taken off down the hall.

I stared. "Hey! Give that back!" Anger thrust me out of my shock. I darted after the bird. "Stop that parrot!"

Quarra's footsteps pounded after mine. "Good with birds, eh?"

My cheeks reddened. "That usually works!" I threw back over my shoulder. The parrot careened down the hall. I followed it, wishing there was better air circulation in here. I'd have liked to see that fucking bird fly through a whirlwind.

The parrot rounded a bend. "Oh, do be still," chided a voice that managed to sound both youthful and grandmotherly at the same time. There was a startled squawk, then silence.

I rounded the bend and skidded to a stop.

The Seer was standing in the middle of the hallway with the parrot on her shoulder. Nathyrra stood at her other shoulder. The former Red Sister was holding something gray and fuzzy.

I goggled a little at the parrot, who was standing quite calmly on the Seer's shoulder, as if it had meant to be there all along. I met the Seer's eyes. " _How_ did you do that?"

The Seer smiled and held my holy symbol out to me, the chain seeming somehow heavy and crude in her delicate hands. "I asked Eilistraee to soothe it, and she did."

My mouth opened and closed a couple of times. "Right." So the Seer was a parrot tamer. As a matter of fact, she was a better bird tamer than me. _Some Windwalker I am_. Flushing, I took my holy symbol back from the Seer. I had it raised over my head, ready to put it back on, when the creature Nathyrra was holding caught my eye, mostly because she was holding it by its tail - its long, poofy gray tail. " _Please_ tell me that's not a squirrel you're holding," I said plaintively. "Lie to me if you have to."

Nathyrra looked down at the creature which was dangling from her grip. "Very well," she said gravely. "This is not a squirrel."

I watched the squirrel bob gently as Nathyrra gestured. It chittered softly, but otherwise made no protest. The Seer could calm _anybody_ down, it seemed – humans, elves, and woodland creatures alike. "Great. Thanks. Much obliged." I straightened and put my hands on my hips. "Now, could somebody tell me what the hell is going on?"


	43. Machinations

_The whole world's sitting on a ticking bomb  
_ _So keep your calm and carry on  
_ _The whole world's sitting on a ticking bomb  
_ _And it's about to explode_

\- Aloe Blacc, "Ticking Bomb"

~*~  
Chapter 43: Machinations  
~*~

The Seer let go of Mhaat's hand. "There. Try to move it. How does it feel?" she asked.

Mhaat flexed his hand. His finger was back where it belonged. A pale scar ringed it, but aside from that, it looked unmarred. "It feels better than it did the day I was made," he assured the Seer. He hulked over her and her table, dwarfing them both, but his wings were tightly furled, as if he wanted to minimize the amount of space he took up, and his voice was a gentle rumble, like a lion's purr. "Thank you, Mother Seer."

The Seer gave him a dimpled smile. She had a squirrel on one shoulder and a parrot on the other, like a pirate who'd decided to atone for a life of debauchery by starting a wildlife sanctuary. "You are most welcome, child," she said, and began to clear away the bloody bandages.

Lomylithrar stepped forward, putting out a belaying hand. "Please," he murmured. There was an expression of quiet pain etched in his face along with his scars, and it sharpened when he looked at the golem, who was admiring his newly healed hand with open delight. "Allow me to help."

The Seer glanced up at the avariel. Her expression softened. "As you wish," she murmured, and touched his hand in a comforting sort of way before pushing herself away from the table and leaving the former healer to console himself by playing healer's assistant.

I stood by and watched and wondered when we'd started trusting Lomy enough to let him into our little inner circle. Then I actually thought about it and stopped wondering. His fortunes were tied with ours, and he had nowhere else to go, so why not trust him? It wasn't like he could betray us to the other drow – not without being thanked for his help and promptly turned into a pair of gloves and a nice avariel-skin cloak.

While Lomy tidied up, Cupron stood next to Mhaat, his massive copper arms crossed over his chest and his face set in a frown. "Your action was irrational, brother."

Mhaat looked up from his hand. "I beg your pardon, brother. How was my action irrational?"

"You did not know anything about this creature, and you did not pause to gather information before you captured it. What if it was a greater foe than you presumed?"

Mhaat rolled his orange eyes. "You think too much, brother." He turned and spoke confidingly to the Seer. "All of our metal brothers do."

Cupron sighed like a teakettle. "While our demon-flesh brothers are of a disorderly and impassioned nature."

Mhaat smiled his sweet, horrible, misshapen smile. "That is why we are brothers. You were made to do what I cannot, and I was made to do what you cannot."

Cupron looked at his fleshly counterpart. His expression eased, and he bowed his head. "Yes. There is wisdom in what you say. Please forgive me, brother. It is I who am in error."

Mhaat lowered his hand, although he still flexed it now and then, as if testing to make sure his finger really was firmly re-attached. "Thank you, brother," he said gently. "But there is wisdom in what you say, too." He looked at his hands. They were a slightly different shade of red from his arms, the boundary between colors sharply delineated by the white zipper-line of old stitching scars. "Perhaps some remnant of tanar'ri recklessness lingers in me, despite our Maker's best efforts to eliminate it," he mused. "I will try to think more from now on."

Cupron smiled. "And I will try to be more…disorderly."

Mhaat grinned his snaggle-toothed grin."That is fair, brother." He looked at the Seer. A worried expression creased his lumpy forehead. "Will the parrot creature be well? I hope I did not hurt it. That was not my intent."

The Seer touched the parrot on her shoulder. "It is unhurt, and Eilistraee has driven the rage from its mind, for now." She smiled. "You need not fear that you have done it harm, my gentle giant."

Mhaat beamed. "I am glad."

I snorted. "You're _glad_?" I grabbed my holy symbol protectively and gave the parrot a suspicious glare. It looked practically catatonic now, but that didn't fool me. It was a drow parrot. It _had_ to be plotting something. "That damn thing bit your finger off."

The demon-flesh golem shrugged. "It was frightened. I am sure it did not mean me any harm."

Laele lowered her teacup. "Hah! Frightened, my arse." She scowled at the squirrel. "I was trying to decorate a cake when this blasted thing jumped up on my counter, ran through the frosting, and made off with a basket of my best truffles, to boot." She sniffed. "It is lucky it did not become part of the menu."

Deekin's eyes brightened. "Ooh. It been a long time since Deekin eaten squirrel." The kobold got all misty-eyed in reminiscence. "Sometimes, in the summer, one would get lost in kobold caves, and we would puts it in a stew. Could we has squirrel stew, maybe?"

Laele eyed the kobold. "Did you truly eat such sad, scrawny things?"

"Oh, they not be so bad," Deekin said cheerfully. "Especially after you been eating beetles all winter, 'cause after a while they be the only things around that not be kobolds."

Laele's face softened. "You poor sod." She patted his shoulder. "Come by my kitchen some time, and I'll roast you a nice, juicy rack of tarsk."

Deekin grinned. "Thanks, nice cook lady. Deekin not know what that is, but it sounds tasty."

"Yeah, don't eat that thing, Deeks," I said darkly, eyeing the squirrel. "It's probably rabid. Or possessed. God knows what it would do to your stomach."

The Seer pursed her lips. "That may be truer than you think."

I blinked and turned to her. "Come again?"

The Seer sighed. "These beasts' minds were enspelled." She stroked the squirrel's fluffy tail as she spoke, soothing strokes that made the squirrel's eyelids droop. "Their actions were not entirely under their control, and the hooks of the spell that held them caused them pain. By the grace of Eilistraee, I have temporarily weakened their master's hold, but I dare not lift it. They were sent here to deliver a message." Her fingers toyed with the little message cylinder we'd taken from the parrot's leg. "Though it pains me to say it, to break the enchantment might be a reply we are best advised not to make – not yet, at least."

Deekin squinted up at the squirrel. "Why would they sends animals instead of people, though? Squirrels not so good at following orders." His snout crinkled. "Deekin tried to train one once. It just bit him a lot and ran away."

It wasn't the Seer who answered. "If the creature's mind is being ridden by a mage, it will take instruction well enough – enough to slip through our defenses," Nathyrra explained. She stood a little removed from the rest of us, like she'd drawn an invisible wall around herself. "It is an ingenious solution to the problem. After their last communication, Vharzyym knew that we would be on our guard against a more _usual_ sort of messenger." She nodded at our visitors – one furry, one feathery. "These, however, are unusual enough that we could not predict them, and thus could not take countermeasures."

 _Damn drow. You boost security, and the first thing they do is find a workaround_. Valen was going to have to start setting out mousetraps if this kept up. "All right," I said. "That makes sense." I met Nathyrra's eyes. She looked back icily. She was obviously still upset with me, and I just as obviously needed to put on my big girl pants and apologize. _As soon as I can get her alone,_ I decided. It would suck and it still might not put things back the way they used to be, but at least it would clear the air. _I hope_. "So, what does the message say?" I prompted at last.

Nathyrra turned a tiny roll of parchment over in her fingers, frowning at it. "Nothing."

I couldn't have heard that right. "Nothing?"

The ex-assassin's lips thinned in annoyance. "Nothing." She held up the piece of paper. "It is blank."

I stared at her. "Wonderful. That's _exactly_ what I needed to hear right now."

Nathyrra's reply was barely more than a mutter. "If you thought hearing it was bad, you should try seeing it." Leather creaked as she shifted. "Seer, I would like to-"

A commotion at the door interrupted her. There was a brief exchange of voices – one a fluting tenor and one like scorched silk. My heart leapt so far into my throat it felt like it went right through the top of my head and hit the ceiling, and I jerked bolt upright just in time to see the door open and Valen stride in.

Like he always did, Valen gave the room a quick danger-assessment once-over. Then his eyes fell on the golems, and he did a double-take. He paused just long enough for me to _really_ appreciate the look on his face, which was the purest expression of, "Oh _hell_ no," I'd ever seen in my life.

Then the weapon master turned on his heel and marched back out, all without saying a word.

A guard peered in, then closed the door again. Once it clicked shut, Nathyrra, the Seer and I all exchanged glances. "Changed his mind?" I murmured. The Seer shook her head and smiled ruefully. Nathyrra bit her lip and looked at the ceiling.

Cupron and Mhaat were also exchanging glances, although theirs were confused. "Why did the General leave?" Mhaat asked.

Cupron's emerald eyes flickered uncertainly. "Did we offend?"

I looked at the golems' earnest faces and decided to tell a little white lie. "He probably just forgot something."

A faint chuckle came from Nathyrra's direction. "Yes. His patience."

I felt a flicker of relief on hearing her chuckle. _Well, at least she's talking to me civilly now._ I supposed that was a good sign. It was definitely better than having her leave the room every time I walked in. At this rate, maybe I'd even be able to apologize before the Valsharess killed us all.

The door opened again. Imloth's voice came over the threshold, cajoling. "Now, now, come back, _abbil_. It is not so bad."

"Fine." Valen's voice was a hounded and slightly sulky rasp. "Then _you_ speak to them."

"I?" The two men appeared. The drow had the tiefling by the shoulders. As I watched, Imloth steered his friend gently but insistently over the threshold. "I shall do no such thing. I have told you before, such feats are for the _jalilin_ , who are wiser and more patient than we."

Valen ran his hand through his hair and ducked his chin a little. "That takes very little," he muttered. His eyes went to me, and he flashed me a slightly sheepish smile.

An answering smile came to my face before I could stop it. _Damn it._ Barely out of the starting gate, and I was already stumbling. In my defense, he did look cute when he realized he was being an idiot.

Imloth still had his 'pep talk' voice on. "Now, chin up, as surfacers say. If you are lucky, one day you will look back on this and laugh." The drow let go of Valen, paused, and looked around. "My goodness," he said then. "It is becoming crowded in here. If the lady priestess finds us any more allies, we will need to find a bigger room to put them in." He looked at the Seer and cocked his head quizzically. "And why do we have a surface bird of many colors?"

The Seer sighed. "The creature bears a message. It seems that we have been contacted by House Vharzyym." Her mouth twisted ruefully. "Again."

That distracted Valen from the golems and got the Seer his undivided attention to boot, thank Shaundakul. While the Seer brought him up to speed, I tried to breathe. Seeing him again after my little epiphany felt like getting kicked in the stomach by a unicorn – it made me want to puke rainbows. _Polite and professional,_ I reminded myself. _Come on. You've got this._

While I gave myself a pep talk, the Seer's explanation wound down. "The use of surface animals hints at Vharzyym's involvement, but we have yet to decipher their senders' intent." She spoke with her hands folded in front of her, her gaze even, as if discussing the weather. "The message appears hidden – the parchment, blank."

Valen stared at the little message tubes as if they'd offended him personally. "They gave you a blank piece of paper."

The Seer nodded serenely. "Yes."

Valen persisted, his voice getting steadily more incredulous. "With nothing on it."

"Yes."

Valen stared for a second, and then switched to a scowl. "Are all drow intrigues this deranged, or is this a special case?"

The Seer considered that, then smiled. Dimples appeared in her cheeks. "Yes."

Nathyrra spoke up. She was standing a couple paces back, frowning and, for some reason, holding the little scrap of parchment to her nose. "There is something else that is strange…"

The Seer turned to the younger drow. "What is it, _dalharil_?"

The former Red Sister inhaled a couple of times – sharply, neatly, through her open mouth, like a scenting cat. Then she wrinkled her nose and lowered the paper. "This parchment smells strange," she observed. She held the piece of paper out to the nearest person, who happened to be Imloth. "Here. What do you smell?"

Imloth took the paper and sniffed at it. He frowned. "It smells like wine."

Nathyrra nodded, as if he'd said exactly what she'd expected to hear. "Wine. Yes. But not quite."

Had the Vharzyym lady been drinking so much she forgot to write an actual message on her message? "Let me try," I said. Imloth handed the paper over, and I sniffed it. All things being equal, I'd have expected my ability to recognize alcohol to be at least as good as Imloth's, but the paper just smelled like paper to me. "I don't smell anything," I confessed. "Deeks? How about you?"

The bard took the paper from my hand and sniffed it, his reptilian nostrils flaring. "Yeah," he confirmed. "Smells like wine." He sniffed again and made a face. "Or like that time Deekin buried a sack of potatoes and forgot about it and they went all gooey and made him feel funny when he ate them."

Glumness settled over me. Everybody here had a better sniffer than me. _Sorry. I'm just a boring human. I can't see shit_ _ **or**_ _smell shit._

Valen cleared his throat. "Might I try?" Wordlessly, I retrieved the paper and handed it to him, but after a careful sniff, he looked at me and shook his head with a mystified frown. That made me feel a _little_ better. Apparently, tiefling noses were no better than human.

Lomy stepped closer, unbundling his hands from the sleeves of his robe, where they'd been tucked. "May I?" he asked diffidently. I gave the paper to him without argument. He took it and gave it a cautious sniff. His green eyes narrowed. "You are right," he told Nathyrra. "It is like wine, but fermented halfway to vinegar." He lifted the paper to the light, turning it this way and that. After a few moments, he sucked in a surprised breath. "Mother Seer? Would you take a look at this?"

The Seer took the paper from him. "What is it?" She held it up to the light, too, then gasped. "Oh! Oh. I see."

I leaned forward. "What? What do you see?"

"There are marks on the paper, as if from the nib of a quill." The Seer fingered the paper thoughtfully, then lifted it to her nose and inhaled. When she lowered the paper again, her expression was…strange. "Ah. Of course. It should have been obvious."

The suspense was killing me. "What is it?"

The Seer smiled sadly. "Something I ought to have remembered from my misspent youth." She sighed. "Long ago, before I found Eilistraee, I sometimes had occasion to send messages that I did not care to have intercepted – or that I wished to have intercepted only by select individuals." She drummed her nails on the table, pensive. "One trick my House used at the time was an ink which could only be seen under the right circumstances – the right combination of reagents, perhaps, or only in certain light."

Lomy nodded slowly, his anxious mien receding a little in the face of a puzzle to solve. "Vanishing ink. Yes, of course."

Deekin gasped. "Invisible ink?" He scrabbled for his notes. "Cool! You mean that stuff be _real_? Like, really real?"

The Seer laughed softly. "Oh, it is very real, though it has been a very long time since I have worked with it, myself. And, of course, there are many different formulations. Some are mundane. Some, less so." She pursed her lips thoughtfully and turned to Lomylithrar. "Perhaps you can help us, my friend. You mentioned that you often worked with an archivist to preserve your people's records, did you not?"

Lomy's nerves re-asserted themselves with a bang. His hands clutched at his voluminous robes, pulling them around him like a hedgehog bundling itself into its own quills. "I…I did."

The Seer smiled at him soothingly. "Then I would wager that you know a great deal about inks of all kinds." Slowly, like reaching out to a skittish deer, she gathered the curled-up messages and held them out to him in her open palm. "Would you mind bending your skills to this task? I am not certain that I remember all of my old tricks, but perhaps your memories are fresher."

Lomy hesitated, openly torn, and in a flash of gut insight, I saw what the Seer was doing. _Oh._ _ **That's**_ _sneaky_. It was obvious that Lomy was tortured by his past and what he'd lost – his people, his faith, his confidence. He felt like he was no use to anyone anymore, which was why he peeled berries for me and fetched tea for the Seer, because at least that way he was doing _something_. But, with her request, the Seer was forcing him to think about his situation not so much in terms of what he'd lost, but in terms of the knowledge and skills he _still had_. It was a stroke of manipulative genius – a perspective shift designed to jog him out of his depressive rut and get him to see that he wasn't so useless after all.

I stared at the Seer in admiration. _Man, we're lucky she's on_ _ **our**_ _side._ If she used her powers for evil instead of good, we'd all be screwed. Instead, she was the consummate leader-slash-therapist - which was great, because everybody in this room needed a little guidance and a lot of therapy, me included.

Lomy, on the other hand, was more nerve-wracked than awed. "I…I suppose…"

The Seer kept smiling and didn't retract her hand. "Please. It would be a great help to us."

The avariel's slender hand half-reached out, then withdrew, then reached out again. "I…very well." With tender care, he scooped up the little pieces of paper, then settled at the table, delicately unrolling the first message with his fingertips and studying it with an intent frown. "Hmm. We might try heating it, but I would be reluctant to risk damaging the parchment. Had we moon or sun, I would read it by their light, but we do not, and in any case I do not think moonlight is the answer, here. Not in the Underdark, and not with that smell…" He clucked his tongue in thought and looked up. "I need potash. Or crushed egg shells, if naught else can be found."

The Seer scooted her chair closer to Lomy's. "Ah! It begins to return to me. Yes, potash might work, particularly if they used vitriol…"

Lomy frowned thoughtfully. "Do you think the ink might be oak-gall based?"

"Oaks _do_ grow in the Vharzyym garden."

"Truly?" Lomy's face turned wistful. "How strange. I should like to see that." His lips twisted, and the biting humor of the Talontar was suddenly _there,_ surfacing from his mild-mannered demeanor like a piranha from a still pond. "Alas, much as my heart yearns to see the trees again, it also yearns to remain inside my chest, which it will not do for long if I dare to show my face to your brethren." He sighed philosophically and bent to his task. "Ah, well. Egg shells, then…"

Nathyrra took the chair next to Lomy. "Or chalk," she offered. Absently, she drew another piece of parchment to her, along with the Seer's inkwell and quill, and began to write. "Or the ground-up shell of any mollusc." She tapped her lips with the quill's plume. "Eyeless snails, perhaps. Those are cheap and plentiful."

Laele leaned forward. "I might be able to help you with those. How much do you need?"

The elves settled around the table to discuss chemistry. Deekin joined them. I was about to do the same when I glimpsed red hair and mithril from the corner of my eye. My back stiffened. _Oh, god. He's coming over here_. What the hell was wrong with me? The last time I'd been this freaked out by seeing a boy come my way had been when class heartthrob Sammy Hearst sat next to me in the cafeteria and offered me the lollipop his mom had packed in his lunchbox. I'd accepted with delight, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'd never been able to say no to a cute guy who wanted to give me something to suck on.

Valen's voice jerked me back to the present. "How are you feeling?" He stood next to me, his eyes searching my face as if looking for signs of incipient collapse.

I concentrated on keeping a demure distance between us and not smiling at him. "I'm fine now. I just needed to…" _Have a little meltdown._ "…rest."

Valen nodded. A slight softening of his face hinted at relief. "Good."

We stood in silence. Rancid-smelling smoke rose over the Seer's table. Hushed consultation drifted over my head. It sounded like the elves had exhausted Plans A through C and were now working on Plan D.

After a while, Valen shifted. His armor clinked. "So."

I didn't trust myself to open my mouth, just in case I found myself inviting him to play spin-the-bottle. "Hmm?"

"I spoke to Quarra…"

"Mm-hmm." I bit the inside of my cheek, fought to keep myself from saying more, and promptly lost. "Did you know that she hates me?"

Valen arched an eyebrow. "Yes. Is that a problem?"

I stared at him. _All right. I totally did not expect that answer._ "Well, yeah. I mean, she can hate me all she wants, and she won't be the first person to do it, but don't you think it's a bad idea to have someone who hates my guts watching my back?"

Valen shook his head. "Quarra was the best person for the job. She was scoutmistress and then a Matron Mother's personal guard before she fled for the surface and joined the Seer, many years ago. I have known her for as long as I have known the Seer, and I know that she is both loyal and skilled." He shrugged. "She will not harm you, and it will do _her_ no harm to learn how to put her personal feelings aside in service to the Seer."

I parsed that and raised my eyebrows. "So you're using me to teach her a lesson?"

Valen's voice was frank. "If you wish to put it that way, yes – but not only that. My hope is that getting to know you better will temper her dislike." He shrugged. "Who knows? Perhaps she might even come to enjoy your company."

"Optimism, Valen? From you?"

The tiefling chuckled. "Hardly."

"Oh? What is it, then, if not optimism?"

Valen gave me a sweet smile. "Experience."

I had to give my lungs a mental kickstart. It felt like they'd temporarily quit working, and now I couldn't catch my breath. This man was dangerous, dangerous to the bone, and I… _wait._ I was leaning towards him again. _Damn it, Rebecca. You're not a teenager with her first crush. Act your age, would you?_ I squared my shoulders and straightened, imagining an invisible fence between me and him. An electric one. With barbed wire. _Quick. Change the subject._ "Why are we talking about Quarra, anyway?"

Valen shot me a look that was a little startled at first, but soon moved into uncertainty and a little hesitance, as if he'd noticed the change in my attitude and wasn't sure what to make of it. He stood up a little straighter, putting an extra couple of inches between us that felt like a mile. "She knows the dangers of the Underdark better than any of us," he said slowly. He hesitated. "I…would not impugn your skills as a guide, but the Underdark is new territory for you, and I have little experience with it, myself. I thought it would be wise to have her with us."

 _Crap_. What with everything else, I'd almost forgotten about that whole visit-the-mindflayers thing, or maybe I'd just _wanted_ to forget about it. I really did have too much on my mind. "Er. Yeah. Okay. That's fine." I cleared my throat. "Um…speaking of which, two things."

Valen raised an eyebrow. "Those being?"

"Deekin couldn't find me anything that would help me see in the dark out there. Have your people turned up anything?"

He shook his head. "Unfortunately not. The drow have no need of such things, and those who do…" He trailed off into awkwardness.

I remembered the human woman in the market, the one with the collar around her neck, and managed to fill in the blanks. It didn't take much thinking, when I tried to think like a drow. "Those who do are slaves, and the drow don't want their slaves having access to anything that might help them escape," I finished.

Valen looked at me a little warily, as if expecting me to get angry. "Yes."

I took a deep, deep breath. "Fine." There was no use getting upset. If I marched down to the slave pens right now and broke them all open, even assuming I could, I'd feel better for a few minutes, but then the riots would start and the city would turn on us and then we'd all be screwed, slaves and free people alike. "That's fine. I can deal with that." I might have wished I'd had the chance to properly supply myself for a trip to the Underdark, the way Drogan had taught me, with dark-seeing potions and ropes and a source of fresh water and all that, but never in a million years had I ever _expected_ to end up down here, so I was just going to have to do the best I could with what I had. "I'll need to have a light handy, that's all."

Valen nodded. "Quarra's help will be invaluable there," he assured me. "She can scout ahead and warn us if there are any threats nearby which might be attracted by the light."

"And if there are?"

It was strange, how a man so impatient about some things could sound so patient about this one. "Then we shall simply have to guide you through the dark."

That didn't improve my mood. _Some savior I am, if I can't even walk from Point A to Point B without help._ I tried to shove the thought aside, although the thought that took its place wasn't much pleasanter. "What about, you know, once we get where we're going? The whole not getting our brains sucked out deal?"

Valen nodded. His face turned solemn. "I asked Imloth to make some inquiries. It appears that House Ischarri keeps the slave traders here supplied with enchanted circlets which are proof against illithid mind-hacking."

 _Mind-hacking?_ There were times when Valen used words that sounded like they might almost-but-not-quite fit in at home. "Fine. Can we get our hands on one?"

"Yes. One of the traders is willing to lend one to us – for a price."

 _Oh. This old song and dance_. "All right. So they're shaking us down. How much for?" Valen named a big number, so big even I recognized it as big. "Sweep Jumpin' Jehosaphat. That's not a shakedown, that's grand larceny."

Valen flushed. "The enchantment is rare and difficult, I understand. And the slavers have no love for us."

"They wouldn't." The Seer didn't believe in enslaving people. "But you'd think they'd be more willing to help us out. All things considered."

"They are. That is half his usual rate."

"Seriously?" No wonder why nobody wanted to be a commoner around here. "Oh, well. Let's do it. Beggars can't be choosers."

Valen shrugged. "We will still have my portion of the profit from the Maker's sanctum, if we need it."

"All right. Thanks." I didn't argue or ask if he was sure. That was what people always did to _me_ when I told them I didn't want money. Valen knew his own mind and wasn't shy about giving me a piece of it. If he said he didn't want the money, then he didn't want the money. "I'll tell Deekin to cough up the dough." _And I'll ask him to tell me everything he knows about mindflayers._ "In the meantime, you can tell Imloth to make the deal happen." I glanced over to where all those smart, sharp-nosed elves were playing with chemicals. A haze had formed over the table. "Assuming he survives whatever they're doing over there."

Valen glanced over his shoulder, took in the scene, then shrugged and turned back to me, apparently deciding that as long as no one was screaming, bleeding, or on fire, then whatever was going on over there was probably nothing he had to worry about. "The dough?" he asked.

 _Oops._ I'd lapsed into Earth slang again. On the bright side, I was talking to a Cager, whose native lingo was at least as confusing as mine. "The cash," I supplied. "Moolah. Benjamins. Filthy lucre. You know. Money."

The tiefling gave me a bemused look. "How many words do you have for money, back on…" He paused, glanced at the others, then revised that to, "…where you come from?"

I shrugged. "Lots. We're a very enterprising people."

"Obviously."

"What? Don't Cagers have a bunch of words for money?" Over Valen's shoulder, I saw a puff of green smoke rise. Lomy stood and fanned at it frantically with both hands. Absently, I threw a little twist of air to disperse the smoke. "You mentioned…jink, was it?"

Valen nodded. "Jink. Or greens."

A lightbulb went on over my forehead. I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. "Hey! That's almost like greenbacks!"

Valen was smiling a little. "What about milk? Do you have any word like that?"

"Milk?" I raised my eyebrows suspiciously. "Is this building up to some kind of pun about liquid assets?"

The weapon master's forehead creased. "Ah…no. It is Cager rhyming slang." He shrugged. "Milk and honey equals money. Simple, no?"

Back at the table, someone knocked over a bottle. There was a clink, a gurgle, a hiss, and a sudden spate of swearing. "No, it's not simple at all," I protested. "Come on. That doesn't make any sense."

Valen's smile widened into a smirk. " _That_ is because you are not a Cager."

"Oh, just admit it. You guys just made that one up to confuse us Primes."

The tiefling's blue eyes lit with laughter. "That, too."

This was fun. I scoured my brain a little more. At the table, Imloth beat out a small fire with a tea towel. "How about clams?"

Valen repeated the word as if he wasn't sure he'd heard me right. "Clams?"

I grinned and nodded. "Clams."

Valen's face said he wasn't sure if I was pulling his leg, or maybe yanking his tail. "Isn't that a type of fish?"

"Yeah, but folks used to use clamshells as money way back when, so I guess the term stuck."

The weapon master sounded surprised. "That almost makes sense."

I laughed. "Makes a whole lot more sense than naming your currency after something that comes out of a _cow_."

Valen laughed softly, but didn't otherwise reply. Molten honey trickled down my spine. That laugh had been the auditory equivalent of a good cigar – smooth, smoky, and terribly bad for my health.

Lomy saved me from myself. He held the tiny pieces of parchment aloft. The avariel was coughing and a little watery-eyed from the chemical fumes, but triumphant nonetheless. "We have it!"

I could have hugged him, only I wasn't going to, because I'd probably maul his wing stumps by accident and then I'd have to apologize and I already had enough to apologize for as it was. I stepped towards the table, which also conveniently happened to be away from Valen, but I covered it by making like I was just excited to hear the news. "Great! What does it say?"

It was Nathyrra who answered, and her voice was as grim as Lomy's was buoyant. "Beware Ischarri."


	44. Best Laid Plans

_People have all sorts of pasts, sometimes dark or dreary, but perhaps the actions they choose in the present are the ones that carry the most weight._

— Erin Bowman

 _The best laid plans of mice and men/often go awry._

\- Robert Burns, "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785"

~*~  
Chapter 44: Best-Laid Plans  
~*~

Nathyrra sat at the table, her hands tightly clasped. "The message is in two parts – two pieces, two words, two inks. What is more-" She hesitated, as if reluctant to say it.

The Seer said what Nathyrra didn't want to. "One half was written with a formulation that was popular in Menzoberranzan, when I still lived there." Her eyes were dark and fathomless. "It has since fallen out of favor, as cleaner, cheaper methods have been devised in the centuries since."

 _Centuries. Good god._ How old _was_ she? _Nope. Not gonna ask that question._ "And the other half?" I asked instead.

Nathyrra stared at her hands. "It is a concoction used by the Red Sisters." She looked up, tension pulling lines in her smooth face. "This was a test. None of you would have been able to decipher the second half of the message without my assistance. That technique is a secret known only to the Red Sisters."

The Seer's fingers curled gently around the younger woman's shoulder. "No one here doubts your loyalty, Nathyrra."

Nathyrra's eyes flicked to me. "Perhaps, perhaps not, but that is not our most immediate concern." She took a deep breath. "Right now, I think we must ask ourselves two questions: why has Vharzyym chosen us for this warning, and why now?"

 _Beware Ischarri._ I thought back to our night on the town. "Maelra Ischarri seemed pretty interested in the golems."

Cupron straightened, his emerald eyes flaring. "Interested in us?" he exclaimed. "Whatever for?"

I looked at the golem, with his shining face and ancient, innocent eyes. "She wants to use you," I said, as gently as I could. "I'm sorry."

Mhaat's orange eyes swirled in confusion. "Use us?" he echoed. "But we are sentient beings, gifted by our Maker with free will. How would she use us?"

Cupron drew himself up, crossing his arms over his barrel chest. "We are not tools to be used," he intoned.

Nathyrra laid a hand on the golem's arm, ebony on copper. "Which Maelra Ischarri will find out, to her sorrow, if she attempts to control you."

That was nice and all, but the idea that occurred to me then was anything but nice. I grabbed Mhaat by the arm. "Where's the Power Source?"

Cupron answered. "Protected." He touched his hand to his chest, where, now that I was looking, I could see the fine rectangular seam of what might have been a compartment, right where his heart would have been if he had one. "I hold it now."

I blew out a breath. "Okay." I raised my hands at a motion from the golem, as if he was about to open up his chest and show me his battery right then and there. " _No_ , don't show me." What I knew, I could be made to tell. "In fact, from now on, don't show it to anyone, us included. And I think that after this you should move it, and make sure you guys are the only ones who know where it is." I met Cupron's eyes, trying to make my meaning clear through the force of my gaze alone. "Do you understand?"

Cupron stared back. "I do not understand. Do you think that Maelra Ischarri will try to take our Power Source from us?"

For beings that were centuries old, the golems sure acted like they'd been born yesterday. "I wouldn't put it past her. And if she gets her hands on the Power Source, she'll have a hold over you that you'll find hard to break. All she has to do is threaten to destroy it." _I should know. That's what I did with Aghaaz._

Mhaat stared at me, horror in his coal-orange eyes. "That is vile."

 _Yeah, and what does it say about me, if I'm the person who came up with the idea in the first place?_ "It is," I agreed, my voice grim. "But we're talking about the woman who murdered her whole family. I don't think she'd flinch at coercion and blackmail."

Valen's voice, when he spoke, was grave. "No. I doubt that she would." He looked at the golems, his eyes cold and bleak as a winter sky. "I would advise that you do as Rebecca suggests. The choice, of course, is up to you, but I believe the danger is real. Any Matron Mother would give her right arm to have an army of beings such as you at her disposal."

Cupron stared back at the tiefling, then sighed. Steam rose towards the ceiling. "Very well. We will speak to our people, and warn them of the danger this Maelra Ischarri represents."

Nathyrra put a comforting hand on the golem's arm, which was strange, because when I actually thought about it I realized that she rarely touched anyone. "It may well be that the danger will never come," she reassured him. "Not if we are armed with knowledge. Few things can stand against that." Abruptly, she turned to the Seer. "Mother Seer, with your permission, I would like to continue negotiations with Zessyr Mae'vir. If she believes that we may yet accept her offer, she will keep me in her counsel, and that will allow me to learn more about her alliance with House Ischarri and ascertain what threat they pose to us."

The Seer met Nathyrra's eyes. Her own were sad, but resigned. "It will be dangerous," she warned.

Nathyrra returned the Seer's gaze steadily. "Ignoring this warning would be more dangerous still."

The Seer made one last attempt to dissuade her. "Have you considered that Vharzyym has planted this information solely to draw us out – to draw _you_ out, where you will be vulnerable?"

Nathyrra's expression didn't change. "That is a risk I am willing to take."

The Seer studied Nathyrra's face a moment longer, then sighed. "Very well." There was no reproof in her voice, just calm acceptance and quiet steel. "It is, of course, your decision, and I will respect your judgment in this."

Nathyrra bowed her head. The corners of her mouth lost their defensive tightness, and her sigh of relief was audible. "Thank you, Mother Seer."

Mhaat stooped to peer in Nathyrra's face. "You are seeking information?" He grinned like a happy gargoyle. "I approve. Learning is a worthy pursuit. Is there anything we can do to help?

Nathyrra looked up at the golem. They made for a striking picture – the hulking Frankenstein monster and the sleek, slight drow. "Actually, yes," she said thoughtfully. "There might be something."

* * *

"You must not use it until you are well out of sight," Nathyrra admonished the big red golem. She folded his fingers around a tiny vial. "Once you do, remember what I said: you have only as much time as it will take you to count to six hundred out loud."

Mhaat smiled and laid one hand on the drow's shoulder. There was only enough room for two of his fingers. "I understand, Nathyrra Kant'tar." His voice was a hollow boom in the temple's empty square. "I will use my time wisely."

The drow nodded. "Good. I wish you luck, Mhaat." She turned to Cupron, who was standing at the foot of the temple stairs. "Cupron. Do you remember what I told you?"

The copper golem gave her a blank stare, as if her question didn't quite make sense to him. "Of course. My Maker gifted me with an excellent memory. I have calculated that I am able to store twelve-point-three billion words with perfect recall, and twenty-point-five-five billion with an error rate of less than one percent. Why?" His voice took on a note of concern. "Have you observed faults in my memory? Do I require maintenance?"

Nathyrra sighed. "No, Cupron. I was merely asking for my own confirmation."

Cupron relaxed. "Ah. In that case, yes, I remember your words. Would you like me to repeat them to you?"

The ex-assassin spoke as patiently as a nurse in a psych ward. "That will not be necessary. Thank you."

Cupron nodded. "I will begin my task at the appointed time, then. Do you foresee any issues which we have not yet discussed?"

"Not at this time."

Cupron bowed gravely. "Understood." His voice was about as animated as roadkill. "I am eager to begin."

Mhaat flapped his wings so eagerly that he bashed his pinions together by accident. "Oh, this will be so exciting. It is just like the stories we found in our Maker's old library. Do you think we will uncover dastardly deeds? I would like to uncover dastardly deeds. They sound exciting." His forehead wrinkled like a Shar Pei puppy's. "Though I am not certain what dastardly means. The book never quite explained it."

Cupron just looked at his overenthusiastic brother and sighed, as if even twenty billion words weren't enough for him to come up with a response to that.

Nathyrra saw the golems off. We were alone, for the moment. _Now or never._ I took a deep breath. "Listen. I wanted to talk to you…"

The drow crossed her arms over her chest and looked at me with one snowy eyebrow upraised. "Yes?"

That wasn't very promising. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. _Oh, well. Not like I'm the Queen of Good Ideas, anyway._ "I wanted to apologize."

Nathyrra's eyes were steady on my face, her voice as smooth and even as an iced-over pond. "Go on."

She wasn't going to make this easy on me, was she? I gritted my teeth. "I reacted badly when I found out who you used to work for."

The former assassin shrugged minimally. "No more than anyone else does."

I waved a hand dismissively. "That doesn't make it okay. If everyone else jumps off a cliff, that doesn't mean I should, too."

A very faint smile hovered around Nathyrra's lips. "From what Valen has told me, jumping off a cliff would not present a problem for you."

I folded my own arms and scowled at her. "Are you going to let me apologize, or would you like to let me twist in the wind a little longer?"

The drow's smile grew by millimeters. "I have not yet decided. When I do, I will let you know." She nodded at me. "But go on. I am listening."

This apologizing stuff was for the birds, but I'd already started it so I might as well finish. "All right. There's not much more to say. Fact is, I was wrong to get angry at you, and I'm sorry. You have the right to your secrets, and whoever you were before, you're a different person now." I had to believe that. I couldn't get through this alone, which meant I had to trust – if not Nathyrra, then at least Valen. The man was a professional cynic. If he hadn't found a reason to distrust Nathyrra, the reason probably didn't exist. "If I'd been thinking straight, I would have realized that." I unfolded my arms and held up my hands, palms out. "That's it. That's all I had to say."

Nathyrra looked at me for an uncomfortably long time before she replied. "Why were you not thinking straight?"

My mouth opened and closed a few times before an answer finally flew out of it. "Because I still have nightmares about the time a Red Sister tried to kill me."

Nathyrra cocked her head. "But she failed."

I grimaced. "I was lucky."

"Is she dead?"

An image flashed in my head – a body, splayed on the pavement and haloed in blood. "Very."

The drow shrugged. "Then the rest is irrelevant. You won. She lost. That is all that matters."

I couldn't help but laugh. "That was a very drow thing to say."

Nathyrra tossed her head. "Of course it was. I _am_ drow, after all." Her prideful air faltered a little. "Though I would like to be…a different kind of drow. The kind that Eilistraee says we all can be."

If that wasn't a statement that screamed for reassurance, I didn't know what was. "I'd say you're doing a pretty good job of it."

Nathyrra frowned. "Am I?" Doubt and anxiety were there in the way she plucked at the cuffs of her sleeves. "I hope so."

I hunted for a subject change to ease us away from the whole crippling-self-doubt thing. "What will you do while we're gone?"

The ex-assassin took a breath. Her cool re-asserted itself. "What I must." She cocked her head. "As will you." It was half a statement and half a question.

What else could I do? "I will."

Nathyrra nodded curtly. "Good. Remember to guard yourself well, take no unnecessary risks, and if you must strike, strike swiftly and without mercy."

Nathyrra had a weird way of mothering people. _Now, bundle up, eat plenty of fiber, and remember, always aim for a major artery._ "I'll be careful," I promised. I just hoped I wasn't lying, although previous experience suggested that I probably was.

We stood in silence for a while. The atmosphere had lost some of its tension with my apology. I decided not to push my luck by opening my mouth and maybe ruining it. I looked out over the city, instead. Purple lights winked at me. It was beautiful. Terrible, twisted, dark, and beautiful, just like its people. The only exceptions were a handful of hope-drunk rebels who believed there was no soul so dark that it couldn't be brought back to the light.

I thought of the Seer, wise and old, and Nathyrra, young and searching, and Imloth with his loopy bravado, and Lomy with his deep, deep doubt, and Valen, who deserved every joy and had gotten every sorrow instead. I didn't want these people to die. The world would be poorer for the loss. Also, I'd be fucked if I let that bitch get away with stealing Silent Partner. I owed her a whole lot of pain for that one. "What's she really like?" I asked suddenly, ignoring the inner voice of caution that told me maybe this wasn't the best question to ask right now. "The Valsharess, I mean."

Nathyrra stared out over the temple square. "Cunning. Ruthless." Her face turned pensive. "Though she could actually be quite funny, at times. Her humor was cutting, but mischievous, and she was fond of pranks."

"Pranks?" I couldn't have heard that right. "What kinds of pranks?"

"Well…" Nathyrra pursed her lips in thought, then laughed. "Once, she replaced Sabel's eye cream with a potion of blindness."

I stared. "That's not funny."

The ex-assassin looked away and shrugged a little. "I suppose you would have to be drow to appreciate it." She sounded a little defensive. "And it _did_ wear off. After a time."

 _Drow humor._ "Maybe you just had to be there."

"Perhaps." Nathyrra thought a bit more. "And every so often, she would call one of the Red Sisters to her quarters to take _bazi_ tea with her." The ex-assassin shook her head. "It was a test, of course – of our loyalty, not to mention our nerve." She frowned. "But when I think of it now…now, I think she was lonely."

 _Just like you._ Just like everyone in this damn city. "It's lonely at the top, I suppose."

"True, but power is its own comfort - or so I once believed."

"And now?"

Nathyrra frowned at her hands. Her fingers worried at her cuffs. "And now I believe that everything I once believed to be true was a terrible lie, and everything I was taught to take for a lie was the truth."

There wasn't a whole lot I could say to that. "Look on the bright side. At least now you know."

The drow woman blew out a long sigh and ran her hand through her hair. "Yes. At least now I know."

We stood in silence a while longer. I didn't really want to take that first step towards the city gates quite yet, and Nathyrra didn't seem too eager to take her first step towards her next job, either.

Eventually, Nathyrra cleared her throat. "You should leave. You have duties to attend to, as do I." She spoke with confidence, but her fingers still tugged at her sleeves. "I am sure we shall both have new information to discuss on your return."

I grimaced. " _If_ I return."

" _When_ you return," Nathyrra corrected firmly. She clenched her fist, pressed it to her heart, and bowed. " _Bwael tah'entil._ " She looked at my face, smiled, and supplied the translation. "Good hunting."

I couldn't think of anything to say that was half so fancy as that, so I just went with what I knew. "Go get 'em, tiger."

Nathyrra smirked. "I intend to." Then she bowed again and left, her feet hardly making a sound.

I watched her go. Then I turned and left, too, because there was work to be done and time was wasting.

* * *

The gates of Lith My'athar yawned like the maw of some great old beast. The metal spears with their sharp finials were its teeth; the thick granite walls, its throat; the road, its unfurling tongue.

My boots scraped against stone. The sound echoed, way too loud for comfort. That was because there was nothing beyond the gates to stop it – nothing but barren stone, rolling from the wall of the city to the wall of the cavern that held it, where everything blended together in a thick smear of shadow.

I looked at the expanse of stone, then behind me, drinking in one last draught of the twilight city. Its eerie faerie-tale twinkle was already getting swallowed by the dark. I felt like a sailor losing sight of the shore, on my way to the open ocean and Umberlee's questionable hospitality.

Suppressing a shudder, I faced front again. Valen was walking ahead of me. His tail swayed from side to side, the tip of it occasionally brushing against the backs of his calves. I couldn't help but notice what the other end was brushing against, too. _Christ, that is one_ _ **hell**_ _of a rear view._ Then I realized what I was thinking and gave myself a mental slap. _Bad Rebecca. This is inappropriate behavior and you should be ashamed of yourself._ My eyes roamed down, then paused. He had a kink in his tail, near the tip, as if it had been broken and then never healed right. Had he shut a door on that thing, or was I looking at the universe's weirdest war injury?

A jab in the side of my leg made me jump and tear my eyes from Valen. I looked down to see Deekin glaring up at me. "Seriously, Boss?" the bard demanded crossly. "After all the fuss you made, too? For shame."

I went red. "Sorry."

The bard rolled his eyes. "Hey, you not gotta apologize to Deekin. It not _his_ tail you be… _mmmf_!"

After I was sure no other unhelpful comments were forthcoming, I let go of the kobold's snout. "Are you still angry with me for spending all that money?" I demanded, then answered my own question without waiting for the bard's response. "You are, aren't you?"

Deekin hmph'ed. "Deekin still not convinced we couldn't gets a better deal, that be all."

I touched the circlet that was looped through my belt. It was thin gold, set all the way around with greenstones the size of dimes, with their patchwork pattern of different shades of green that made me think of turtle shells. I hadn't dared to wear it – the last thing I needed was for it to roll off my head and into some crevasse somewhere. I just hoped like hell that we could trust the Ischarri slave trader. That message from Vharzyym didn't give me much confidence, but Nathyrra and Deekin had both taken a close look at the circlet and pronounced it legit, so I supposed I was just going to have to trust them on this one. "Beggars can't be choosers, Deeks, and at least this way we might live through Zorvak'mur."

"Yeah, but alive and rich be better than alive and poor, that all Deekin be saying."

I sighed. Drogan had once said that kobolds were distantly related to dragons, and at times like these, I could believe it. "We'll make the money back, Deeks," I said, faking confidence for all I was worth. "When we win this war, you can loot the ever-loving shit out of the Valsharess's palace, and I won't try to stop you."

Deekin sounded a whole less confident than I did. "If you say so, Boss."

"I do." Despite my bravado, a shiver ran down my spine. I tried to cover it. "It's nippy out here. Good thing I brought my cloak."

Valen glanced back at me. His hand hadn't left the hilt of his flail since we'd left the temple, and that watchful tension of his was back in full force. "Are you cold?"

 _Phew._ I thanked my lucky stars he hadn't looked back about thirty seconds ago, or else I'd have had some serious explaining to do. Resolutely, I kept my eyes on his face. "A little," I confessed. "Aren't you?"

He shrugged, indifferent. "I am seldom bothered by the cold. Another "gift" of my demonic heritage, I suppose."

I could _hear_ the disgusted quote-marks clanging into place around the word "gift". _Okay. Obviously a sore spot. Let's not go there right now._ I kept my mouth shut and pulled my cloak more tightly around me. Even that rustle seemed loud. With that silence pushing down on me, my resolution to keep my mouth shut fell to pieces. "Is it always this quiet?"

Valen grimaced a little. "Yes. The Underdark is unique in that. I had never encountered such absolute silence as there is in its deeper reaches." He frowned. "Which reminds me, we will have to be careful and speak only when absolutely necessary, once we are out of sight of the city. Sound carries far in silence such as this."

I studied him sideways. His stride was loose, his face tense, the sway of his tail restless, snapping. "I'll try not to kick over any buckets," I promised.

"So will I, though I fear Quarra will not appreciate our efforts."

"Our?" I echoed. "You mean mine. _You_ should be able to move quietly just fine."

Valen arched an eyebrow in apparent confusion. "Me?"

I smiled, and my brain screamed, 'S _top smiling at him, you dingbat!',_ but my face refused to listen. " _Yes_ , you. Didn't you say you used to pick pockets for a living?"

A shrill voice cut the silence like a buzzsaw. "Wait. You was a _thief_?" Deekin paused, listening to the fading echoes of his voice. "Oops. Hehe. Sorry. Deekin not actually mean to shout that."

Valen glanced at Quarra, who was riding ahead of us with the blank, faraway stare of someone who was trying to choose the best murder weapon to get rid of all of us as quickly and quietly as possible. "Yes, well, luckily for both of us, that was a long time ago, and in a very different place," the weapon master told Deekin, his voice dry. "So I should be well out of the Harmonium's jurisdiction by now."

Deekin ditched his usual position next to me and scurried after the tiefling instead, clutching his notebook and leaving me feeling strangely rejected. "What's the Harmonium?"

Valen studied the bard and his upraised quill with grave suspicion. "The long arm of the Lady's law," he answered, in the terse tone of someone who was hoping they weren't going to be asked any more questions after this. "They like to think of themselves as peacekeepers, and I suppose they are. After a fashion."

Deekin scribbled. "Whaddya mean, 'after a fashion'?"

The weapon master sighed, as if he'd realized there was no way he was shutting Deekin up short of answering his questions. "There are three factions responsible for maintaining law and order in Sigil, such as it is. The Harmonium arrests lawbreakers, the Guvners pass sentences, and the Mercykillers carry them out – and once a thief's been scragged by the Red Death, well, the poor sod's not likely to raise much of a fuss after that."

"Why not?

Valen snorted. "Because he'll be just another piece of crowfeed swinging from the Mercykillers' leafless tree, that's why."

I listened in fascination, and not just for the lowdown on Sigil. Valen's voice had changed subtly, taking on an accent and cadence I hadn't heard before. _Is that the Cage I hear?_ I thought it was, not just because he sounded so different but also because I'd suddenly stopped understanding more than four words in ten.

Deekin rattled on. "So it not so much keeping the peace, more like resting in peace?"

"For the first few days on the tree, yes." Valen shrugged one shoulder laconically. "After that, it is more like resting in pieces."

Deekin scrunched up his snout. "Ew. That be awfully gruesome."

"The truth often is."

"Yeah, but do you gots to tell so much of it? Sometimes your stories make Deekin's hair wants to stand on end, and Deekin not even _gots_ any hair."

Quarra twisted in her saddle and let loose a torrent of words in drow. None of them sounded happy. Valen stiffened a little and shot something back, his voice taking on the undertones of a growl. Quarra looked at him, then bowed her head and murmured something that sounded much more obedient before she gathered her reins and kneed her mount forward again.

I eyed her briefly before curiosity got the better of me, and I leaned towards Valen, lowering my voice. "What did she say?"

Valen frowned after Quarra. "She advised us that we will be reaching the tunnels soon, and once we do, we should not speak unless absolutely necessary," he translated for me. "Our voices will only attract predators."

That sounded way too polite for the tone of their exchange. I gave a neutral little, "Mm-hmm," of understanding and kept my face still. I had a sneaking sense that, whatever Quarra had said, it had been a lot snippier than Valen was letting on. It looked like his plan to get Quarra to like me by forcing me down her throat wasn't going so well. _Great. Now I'm going to have to work double-time to keep the peace with her, or she's going to say something rude and then he's gonna get pissed and slap her down and then she's going to blame it on_ _ **me**_ _._ I didn't need a magic mirror to predict _that_ future, though I did kind of wish Valen was managing his underling better. Maybe they didn't have management training in Hell, or maybe demons just didn't need much more management besides grabbing them by the scruff of the neck and pointing them at whatever you wanted them to kill.

We walked on. The light dwindled. For what felt like the billionth time, I went over what I remembered of Drogan's lessons on the Underdark. It wasn't much.

 _Bring water, or the means to make it._ The water could be poison down here, after seeping so long and so far through soil and stone.

 _Cold rations only. It's not wise to light a cooking fire. And don't use light unless you have to._ If I'd had time and maybe warning, I could have found some better gear. I'd heard of adventurers using potions or enchanted thingamajigs to see in the dark, but those were rare and took time to scrounge up.

 _Walk softly. No perfumes. Speak only when you have to._ The things that lived down here were attracted to light and sound and scent, even more than on the surface.

 _Bring rope, grapples, hooks, and when you climb, whether up or down, always use a safety line._ There was no telling when a cave might open up and swallow you. Quarra had her sticky-footed mount, but from what Valen said, it took years of training to learn how to ride something that could walk on ceilings, and we didn't have years, so the rest of us were stuck with our own two feet.

 _Forget maps. They're useless._ In a place where there were _six_ cardinal directions – north, south, east, west, up, and down – it was basically impossible to draw a map except through elaborate illusion spells, which I couldn't cast, or models, which were too heavy. I'd have to rely on direction sense, memory, and Shaundakul.

Oh, and of course there was the biggest rule of them all when it came to going down to the Underdark: _Don't go down to the Underdark._ But I'd already broken that one, and _how_.

My little rehearsal did little to calm my nerves, and as my nerves wound up, so did my mouth. "You know, that's something I still don't get," I complained. "If we can't talk, how _do_ we communicate? We can't go on a multi-day expedition without saying a word."

Valen shrugged. "The drow have a sign language that they use in these situations."

I frowned and looked at Deekin, who shook his head. I looked back at Valen. "Do you speak it?"

"I do," the weapon master confirmed. I could no longer make out much of his expression, but his voice was reassuring. "Do not worry, Rebecca. If it is safe to speak, I will tell you – and if anything is said that you need to be aware of, I will make sure that you know it."

I relaxed a little. "All right," I said gruffly. "Thanks."

Valen smiled. I could see it in the way the shadows moved on his face. "You are welcome." His eyes held a faint red tinge as he studied me, but he didn't seem upset so it was probably just his night-vision kicking in. His smile faded. "Are you all right? You have been...unusually quiet."

 _Shit._ So he had noticed I was acting differently. "Fine," I said shortly. "Just nervous." And that wasn't even a lie, although it wasn't the whole truth, either.

Valen looked at me a moment longer, then nodded, seeming to accept my explanation. "The Underdark would shake anyone's nerve."

 _Not yours._ I didn't know if anything could shake his nerves. "Yeah," I said, non-committal, and looked down on the excuse of checking my gear. _Healing potions, check, chokepowder, check, lightning-in-a-yogurt-jar, check. Bandages, rope, rations, water – check, check, check, check._ At last, I palmed Kelavir's little fluorspar stone out of my pocket and breathed just a puff of power into it. Dim white light bloomed in the palm of my hand – weak, far too weak for comfort, but it would have to do, because it was all I had.

Valen watched me. He'd been doing that a lot lately. I wasn't sure why, but I sure wished he'd stop. "Are you ready?" he asked.

I licked my lips. My mouth was dry, but, miracle of miracles, my voice didn't crack. "Ready as I'll ever be. Let's go."

* * *

The tunnel climbed up and out of the cavern of Lith My'athar. The slight sense of strain in my calves told me that the slope was shallow but constant, and a faint whisper of air against my cheek told me that there was a breeze coming down the tunnel.

The light faded rapidly. Soon enough, the stone in my hand was an island of light in a vast, dark sea. Quarra ranged ahead, swiftly swallowed by that sea. Deekin stuck close to my side, and Valen was a dim shape on the edge of the light, at times visible only by the occasional flash of silver-green from his armor or red from his eyes. Everywhere else was just dark – heavy, deep, and choking.

Even worse than the dark, though, was the silence.

I'd never considered how much noise there was on the surface, even in the middle of absolutely nowhere – the rustle of plants, the chirp of birds and bugs, the near-subliminal scuttling of critters in the underbrush, and always, always, the wind singing in my ears.

In the Underdark, there were no such noises. Either there was nothing living down here, or everything that was alive was playing dead. In that great void, every tiny, unremarkable noise felt like an act of violence.

A soft plip-plip of water came from somewhere, echo-distorted and maddening, like a faucet with a leak I couldn't find or stem. Clothes rustled, and it was like sandpaper grating over my ear drums. Leather creaked, and it was like the creak of a dungeon door. Deekin scratched his scales, making a loud _ksshk-ksshkt_ that almost made me jump out of my skin. Somewhere, a mysterious, unseen _something_ disturbed some pebbles, sending them skittering down some stony slope.

A shape loomed. I damn near screamed, but stopped myself just in time for my brain to recognize who it was. Quarra glided over the uneven ground on her sticky-toed mount. She looked at the light in my hand with a disapproval that was obvious even through the dark, but didn't comment, maybe because she figured it was better for me to have a light than for her to have to carry me through the dark.

The scout made a few gestures at Valen – a report, maybe - before vanishing again. _She_ didn't make a sound. Neither did her lizard. I got the sudden impulse to scream, just to see if I could make her jump. I thought maybe this place was already driving me crazy.

We moved on. The tunnel shortened, the ceiling got closer, and I started to sweat – cold, sour sweat. Gradually, my awareness narrowed to two things: the awful weight of stone above, and the growing pressure in my lungs, like a ton of snow was pressing down on my chest. I couldn't even hear the silence anymore. Not over the rush of blood in my ears.

Then, what felt like a century later, a breeze rifled through my damp hair and raised goosebumps on my sweaty skin. I looked up. There was light up ahead. An opening. Clear air. _Finally._ Without thinking, I started forward.

An arm appeared in front of me, falling like a bar across the front of my shoulders. Pale fingers curled around my upper arm, very gently, like they were cradling glass. _Valen_. He leaned so close that his lips almost brushed my ear. His whisper was one word: "Wait."

I didn't want to wait. My hands were trembling. So were my knees. I wanted – no, I _needed_ \- to get out of there, but some last, dim spark of wit told me that would be a bad idea. Valen was right. I couldn't just go charging into the unknown. We had to wait for Quarra's go-ahead. I closed my eyes, nodded, and poured every last ounce of will into _not moving_.

We waited. I shivered.

We waited some more. I shook.

Finally, Quarra's mounted silhouette appeared. She waggled her hands in that silent lingo of hers. Valen let his arm drop, and I broke for the open air, the last of my self-control trailing after me in tatters.

As soon as I was well out of the tunnel, I bent over with my hands braced on my knees. Wind ran over me, soothing, clean, and warm. I sucked it in, drawing breath after breath, trying to will the shaking to stop.

After a few moments, a reptilian hand patted mine. Deekin didn't say a word. Just patted. _Pat-pat. There-there. Pat-pat._

Deekin wasn't alone. Valen's husky voice spoke from close by. "I understand how you feel," he said softly. "The darkness here is interminable. It is more than just shadows - it engulfs the heart and swallows courage. I felt much the same way, the first time I came here."

I stared at my knees. Apparently, Quarra had pronounced it safe to speak. I wished she hadn't. _Stop talking, damn it._ I didn't want his sympathy. I didn't want him to be kind. His kindness would kill me.

As my stony silence stretched out, I heard Valen shift uncomfortably, then draw a distance away. I stared at my knees and told myself it was for the best.

A hand tugged at mine, interrupting my brooding. "Boss," Deekin whispered. "Boss, come on, look up. You gotta see this."

I pressed my lips together in irritation, but looked up, because it was Deeks asking.

Then my breath caught in my throat - this time from awe, not fear.

We were on a rise over what, for lack of a better word, I was forced to think of as a lake. The lake occupied the middle of the cavern, which was vast and columned like a giant's throne room. The lake wasn't a big one, but its size wasn't what was special about it. It was the angry red-orange color of it, and the sluggish roil and flow of it, and the burning light and furnace-like heat of it.

The lurid light flickered in the stone that ringed the lake, some kind of black, glassy stone that looked like it had once been molten and had hardened into frozen waves and whorls. "Hey," I whispered over my shoulder. "That looks like the same stuff you're made of."

Enserric's answering flicker was lost in this light. "Depressing to think I might have been born in a hellhole like this – if a sword can be said to be born, anyway."

"I don't know," I murmured. "I think it's kind of pretty."

Enserric sniffed. "Nonetheless, please try not to drop me in it. I do not know if those temperatures could melt me, but I do not think I would like to find out."

I shuddered, remembering the last time the two of us had gotten too far away from each other. "Me neither." I studied the cavern a little more, wary, my eyes trying to probe each shadow and crevice. Rock was usually all lines and angles, but the rock here was sinuous, almost organic in shape, as if it had grown instead of formed. Obsidian and basalt rippled out from the lake in waves, bare of any signs of life. The cavern wasn't dead, though - reddish lichen coated the walls in long streaks, like rust, and phosphorescent mushroom trees clustered here and there, well away from the lake and its heat. Closer in, patches of bulbous, neon-orange fungus grew near the lake, reflecting its light. Above, long, wispy white threads of another fungus hung down from the ceiling, like moss.

As I stood there, I heard a faint whisper up above and looked up to see white shapes ghosting through the air about twenty feet above my head. There had to be dozens of them, moving like a flood, and they had feathery wings, long antennae, fuzzy, segmented bodies, and huge black eyes. They were moths, I realized – the biggest motherfucking moths I'd ever seen, but still, recognizably, moths. I straightened and turned to follow their path, watching them flutter away until the whole flock was just a faint white smear at the far end of the cavern.

My heart rose a little at all the weird, wonderful sights. "Well, would you look at that."

Deekin grinned happily. "Toldja."

I let my hand drop to the little bard's shoulder. His cymbals clinked. "So you did." I pointed at the wispy fungus on the ceiling. "What _is_ that stuff?"

The kobold flipped through his notes. "Wisp lichen," he answered, after a brief search. He looked up. "Watch out. They be poisonous." He pointed. "See there?"

I squinted. "No, not really."

"Oh." Deekin grinned bashfully. "Sorry. Hehe. Deekin keeps forgetting that Boss not got kobold eyes." He cleared his throat. "Well, if Boss _could_ see that far, Boss'd see there be some dead bats stuck in the lichen. It paralyzes them, see."

I tried to see, but all I saw was white, wispy fungus and shadows. "And then?"

"And then it eats 'em."

I regretted ever thinking this place was pretty. "Right." I sought for something else that looked interesting, which didn't take much. I pointed at the bulbous orange mushrooms on the lava lake's shore. "How about those?"

Pages flipped. "Fire fungus. They be nice and toasty." Paper kept rustling. "Poisonous, though. Don't eat those."

I stared at the pretty glowing deadly orange spheres. "Okay. Let's try this another way. Is there anything down here that's _not_ poisonous?"

Deekin's face screwed up in thought. "The rocks, maybe." He rustled his notes some more. "Er. No. No, Deekin takes that back."

Then Quarra was back, flowing over the ground on her sticky-footed mount and shooting us a glare, and it was time to shut up and keep moving.

There was nothing in the cavern that resembled a road, though there was what looked like a path, or at least a continuous stretch of ground that wasn't as rock-strewn as the rest. Quarra and her lizard took off for it, smooth and fast. The rest of us picked our way carefully after her – Valen in the lead, with his confident, surefooted grace, Deekin scurrying after him with the adroitness of someone who'd been born underground, and me well in the rear, stepping with the same slow care I'd have used in a minefield.

I'd kicked a few more rocks and earned a few more dirty looks from Quarra when a warm blast of wind flicked my hair across my nose, almost peremptorily.

I looked up, frowning. That gust had been a little too deliberate to be accidental. _All right, I'm listening, old man. What is it?_

The wind rose a second time, harder. This time, it whipped my hair across my eyes, forcing me to stop. It was either that or trip over the next rock and fall flat on my face.

Blinded, my eyes stinging from the lash of my own hair, I stood and contemplated my life choices, including but not limited to my choice of god.

Then the penny dropped.

Air moved across my skin, stirred my hair and brought strange scents to my nose – dust, hot stone, mold, fungus, the slight acrid smell of guano. The clashing of hot air from the lake and cold air up near the top was making the air churn, generating a tidy little current.

There was _wind_ here. I looked up and touched my holy symbol. _Thanks. Sorry it took me so long._

This time, the wind was gentle, ruffling my hair like an affectionate hand.

I smiled. Then, reaching out, I gathered the air, packed it like a snowball, and stepped up onto thin air.

The air held my weight, and better yet, it was absolutely silent – no scuffing heels, no rolling rocks. It was still a slow way to walk, and I didn't think I could keep it up for miles, but it was a damn sight better than before, and the next time Quarra looked at me, she frowned but didn't glare.

The cavern stretched on. The trail became rockier and rockier as we went. Broken rocks started to litter it. I frowned at them. They almost had the look of a rockslide, or of a mountainside that had ended up on the wrong side of a giant's club. The broken surfaces were pale and free of any lichen or dirt, which meant that the breaks were fresh. How fresh, I had no idea, but it couldn't have been _too_ long, because those breaks were far too clean.

Then – faintly, so faintly that at first I thought it was just my ears playing tricks on me – I heard a rumble. I looked down. Beneath my feet, pebbles quivered for a split second, then went still. My frown deepened.

Enserric spoke in my head. _Seismic activity_ , he supplied. _Be careful. I would not like to find myself trapped beneath several tons of rock._

I wrapped myself in air until I felt like I had pillows strapped to my body – big, cushy, shock-absorbent pillows. _Neither would I,_ I answered fervently. I paused. _Thanks for the warning._

 _Of course. Your well-being is my well-being, wielder mine._

We soldiered on. At the top of the next rise, Quarra drew back on her reins and stopped dead. So did we.

There was a canyon cut in the cavern floor. I crept up and looked down.

A ribbon of magma flowed sluggishly, maybe twenty feet below where we stood. A column of rock had fallen across it, and I could see the broken chunks of it still arrayed in a surprisingly tidy line, magma burbling through the gaps in between them.

Deekin crept up next to me. We exchanged worried glances. There were more fresh cracks in the rock, and the walls of the riverbed looked shiny and new.

Quarra looked down, then half-turned in her saddle to look back at us. Her fingers flashed.

I sidled over to Valen and shot him an inquiring look. He leaned over to whisper in my ear. "This canyon – and that river - was not here before."

That explained the look on Quarra's face. Our route was blocked unless we found a way across that river, or around it. I frowned at the lava. "How do we cross it?"

His deadpan tone gave the joke away before his words did. "I have no idea, but something tells me that swimming is not an option."

I stared into the lava, my eyes watering with the effort of not smiling. "You don't say." I scuffed my toe in the dirt, thinking. "Is there a way around?"

Valen's brief foray into humor withered in the face of my determined solemnity. His voice went stiff, businesslike. "Unclear. It depends on how strong the quake was, and how far-reaching its effects."

The orange band of the river stretched as far as the eye could see, although that admittedly wasn't far. My voice was glum. "Fantastic."

Valen's voice was as glum as mine. "Quite."

Quarra shushed us with a look and heeled her mount downriver, gesturing for us to follow.

I did as I was bid. _Guess she doesn't want to scout alone_. A far-off groan of tortured stone explained why. The last thing any of us needed was for our guide to get pinned under a fallen rock somewhere where we couldn't find her.

The air got hotter, and it started to take on a foul smell, like burning shit.

Eventually, the river ended.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that the river ended in a giant sinkhole.

The sinkhole was perfectly round and must have been hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet deep. The magma river oozed over its edge, smooth and eerily silent. At the bottom was a perfectly circular pool of sluggishly bubbling magma, with each bubble forming over long seconds and then popping in a slow-motion splatter. Ripples of orange light washed over the walls, which were as sheer as the walls of a quarry and scored with deep vertical grooves, as if some giant cookie-cutter had come down and punched a hole right through the rock. They weren't featureless, though. Holes dotted them – shallow caves like pock marks in the basalt, some with litter half-hanging out of their mouths in a way that made me think of the nest of some cliff-dwelling bird.

Quarra moved past me, heading towards the edge of the sinkhole. A few feet shy of the edge, her lizard stopped and dropped into a four-footed crouch, presumably in response to some silent command from his rider. Quarra leaned out of the saddle, reaching for something on the ground. Her hand came up holding something long and black.

I inched forward for a closer look at what she held in her hand. It was a feather – black as a raven's and spiky with who-knew-what kind of filth. My nose wrinkled. The feather was rank, ripe with that same scorched shit-stink that permeated this whole place.

Quarra stared at the feather a moment longer. Then she opened her fingers, and the feather fell straight down, made heavy by the weight of all its horrible encrustations.

The feather hit the ground, and just as it hit the ground, a woman screamed, loud and shrill and wild.

The drow scout stiffened and drew her weapons – a miniature crossbow in one hand and a spear in the other. "'Ware," she snapped.

I was stupid, but I wasn't stupid enough to ignore that scream, not to mention Quarra's obvious alarm. I tried to wrestle Enserric out of his scabbard. "What _was_ that?" I hissed.

As if in answer, another shriek rose from the sinkhole, then another, and as the cries joined in a chorus I realized that they weren't screaming, they were _laughing_.

Movement on the far side of the sinkhole caught my eye.

Black-feathered pinions thrust out from one of the holes in the sinkhole's inner wall. They were followed by hands that gripped the hole's edges, gray-skinned and tipped with unnaturally long, black nails. Next, a straggly-haired head emerged, then a woman's body, naked and gaunt. The winged woman crouched on the lip of her nest on legs like a raptor's and looked around, assessing. Then she pushed off of her perch and dropped like a stone, and for a second I thought she was dead for sure, but then her wings snapped open and an updraft caught and lifted her and then she was rising, calling in an eagle's screech as, behind her, other winged women squirmed free of their nests and poured out of the walls like spiders.

Enserric shimmered brightly enough to place me in the center of a rough red circle of light. "Those are harpies!" he wailed. "Draw me, you buffoon! Don't just stand there!"

"I'm trying," I snarled back, clawing at the sword's crosspiece. Mags hadn't been kidding when she'd said that a two-hander in a back scabbard was slow on the draw. I had to slide it out a few inches at a time, shifting my grip every time, like I was climbing a rope in reverse. "Just a…" A raven-winged crone rose above the lip of the sinkhole, right in front of me. My hand froze on Enserric's blade. "… _shit_."

The harpy grinned at me. She was withered and sagging, her gray skin streaked with dirt and her hair in pale dreadlocks. Her wings couldn't seem to decide whether they were wings with hands or arms with feathers, and occupied some strange middle ground between bird and human. She had all kinds of junk knotted in her hair – tarnished coins, polished stones, even chunks of broken glass. Her eyes lit on my armor, and brightened. "Shiny!" she croaked. Her nails were long and curling and black, and they reached hungrily for my chest. "Give us!"

I stared back. In the absence of any experience that would tell me how to respond when some skank-ass vulture-looking bitch who used her own shit as a hair product told me she wanted my armor because it was shiny, I reverted to pure instinct. "No. Fuck off."

The harpy bared her teeth at me. They were yellow, black-spotted, and worn-down like half-sucked popsicles. "No!" she cawed. "Mine!" Then her wings flared as she lashed out at me.

Reflex took over. Enserric was still stuck, but I had plenty of wind, so I gathered it and threw it at her.

With no real time to focus, my throw was clumsy, but it clipped her wing and knocked her off balance long enough for me to back off and start gathering more air…

…and then stop, as two crossbows _thunk_ 'ed behind me, in unison.

The harpy jerked. One second she was flying high, and then she was reeling with two bolts in her – one in her left side and another in her right wing. She screamed, but not for long. Ice flash-formed over her wing, as if it had been blasted by liquid nitrogen. That sent her into a frantic one-winged flapping, struggling to stay upright and alight, and it seemed she might make it when her screams stopped as if cut with a knife. Foam bubbled on her lips. She dropped, tumbling brokenly for the lava below, no longer screaming or fighting to fly.

I twisted to see behind me. Deekin and Quarra were both reloading and re-winding their crossbows. I faced front again…

…then I had to dive, face-down, as another harpy erupted past the edge of the sinkhole and swooped at me.

The wind of her passage hit me, as well as sound and stench – a screech like a fishwife and a stench like a gas station restroom. "Shiny!" she called, and I was sure she was going for me until her body blurred over me and then the air above me was open again and I twisted in place, trying to spot her again so I could blow her out of the sky.

Black feathers and pale skin blurred. "Shiny!" the harpy called again, and then I spotted her, stooping like a hawk, her talons open and outstretched towards a figure on the ground – or, more specifically, to the shiny, shiny cymbals still strapped to the little figure's back.

I took the sight in and scrambled to my feet. Finally and a little too late, I wrenched Enserric free. "Deeks!" I started to run, gathering wind as I went. "Watch out!"

The bard looked up, his crossbow still only half-cocked. "Oh, _frzztlik_ ," was all he had time to say, and then the harpy's claws closed over him, and his crossbow clattered to the ground.


	45. Hot Water

_"_ _A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water."_

\- Eleanor Roosevelt

 _Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt._

\- Sun Tzu

~*~  
Chapter 45: Hot Water  
~*~

"Shiny!" The harpy's wings strained as she lifted her prize and carried it. "Mine!"

Deekin squirmed in her grasp. "Hey!" he screeched. "Deekin be a free kobold, you know! He not be propert-" The harpy's claws tightened. The kobold's eyes bulged a little. "Erk!"

My head snapped around as the harpy flew over my head. "Oh, _hell_ no!" I yelled at the top of my lungs. I realized I was still holding Enserric. "Shit." I couldn't risk dropping him, especially not with all that lava around. "How sharp are you?"

Enserric flickered. "Magnificently sharp, thank you very m-"

"Great." I raised the sword high, then drove it point-down into the ground. It went right through a bed of moss and into the rock. "Stay there. I'll be right back."

Enserric sparkled with indignation. "Why, I never-"

I ignored him and ran back to the cliff's edge. I drew in a breath and pulled up power. The wind flowed into my, lungs and limbs and heart, speeding me up and slowing down the world.

I ran. The edge of the cliff came up unnaturally fast.

The harpy swooped over it and then down, wings outspread.

I reached the edge a few seconds after her. I didn't fly. I leapt, and thought of smoke.

My leap carried me into a smooth arc, up and out and over the yawning pit, and at the apex of my arc, my body flew apart – into particles, then molecules, then atoms, more dispersed than usual but somehow still cohesive, somehow still _me._

I boiled upwards, weightless, churning in the churning air. I'd lost sight of the harpy. _Where is she? Where is she taking him?_

 _There._ Another thought-presence slid through mine like a sliver of ice, and all at once, my vision shifted – moving to somewhere _else_ , like I'd just switched to a different camera, and taking on a crystalline, shadowy overlay, as if I was viewing the world through a cage of glass. _Do you see her?_ Enserric asked me, and I saw her then in _his_ sight, rising up on the thermals, heading towards one of the high nest-holes in the cliffside, a tasty kobold morsel struggling in her grasp.

I had no idea how I was seeing through Enserric's eyes, or whatever it was that he saw with, but right then I didn't care. I set off after the harpy. I used the thermals just like she did, only I was a cloud and close to weightless, so I was faster, shooting upwards in a swirl of air and vapor.

The harpy got bigger, then bigger still, then loomed in my vision right before I fountained over her and she got smaller again.

I looked straight down at her as I passed. She hadn't seen me, or if she had, she had taken me for nothing more than a puff of steam.

I thought of heavy things, like Valen's flail hitting her right in the teeth.

Air _whoosh_ ed together, solidified into blood and bone and flesh and metal.

I hit the harpy's back. For a sickening moment, she lost her lift and a few feet of altitude. Then she righted herself, her wings straining against my weight. "Go away!" she screeched.

I got an arm around her neck and tightened my legs around her waist. Wings buffeted me. I grabbed a fistful of filthy harpy hair and yanked. "Give him back!" I yelled in her ear.

The harpy's head arched back, showing me her snarl in profile and the tendons standing out in her neck. "No!" Her claws tightened around Deekin, eliciting a yowl. "Mine! Bitch!"

That pained yowl went straight to the set of switches in my head marked 'mindless rage' and flipped every single one of them. "You want 'bitch'?" I roared. I hooked my arm around her neck and dug my fingers into her throat. My vision shifted again, this time into shades of blood. "I'll show you 'bitch'!" Then I reached into her with a hurricane howl of power and snapped her neck.

In an instant, the harpy's body went limp, yielding to the twin forces of death and gravity. Her raptor's legs went limp, too, and yielded up their kobold burden.

I caught a glimpse of Deekin's face, wide-eyed with shock, and then the kobold and the harpy fell out from beneath me – the harpy in silence, and Deekin with a long, wailed, " _Boo-ooss_!"

Reflexes took over. I grabbed for him, but the harpy was falling between us and all I got for my efforts was a handful of feathers and the sight of Deekin's terrified face as he fell.

The harpy fell like a ragdoll. Deekin fell in a much livelier way, clawing and fighting the air, but he was still falling.

I fell, too, but a lot more slowly. I could feel the air dragging at me, like a million hands reaching out from every side to slow my fall. Since the wind obviously wanted to be helpful, I called it, casting it ahead of me like a net and hurling it behind me to propel myself forward like a rocket.

Deekin's, "OOF!" was audible from a distance of about twenty feet. I _felt_ the tug when he hit my net of air, and my heart almost stopped when I saw him bounce and tumble, clutching wildly at nothing, before he came to a bug-eyed, panting stop.

I settled down lightly next to Deekin, then immediately dropped to my knees and flung my arms around him. "Gotcha," I said breathessly. "Don't worry. You're okay. Are you okay?"

The kobold still looked a little wild-eyed. He looked down. "Ummmmmm. Deekin be confused. Is he flying, or is he floating?"

Inane questions were probably a good sign. "Try not to think about it too hard, sweetie."

"Deekin be trying, but it not be so easy." He swallowed hard. Then, moving with enormous care, the little guy reached up and patted my arm. "Thanks, Boss."

"No problem." I tried to smile. "You saved my ass from Aghaaz. Figured it was my turn to save yours."

The bard tittered. "Deekin gotta shoot more golems, then." He looked up. "Ummm. So how do we gets out of here?

"Dunno." I looked up, too, guesstimating the distance between us and the cliff's edge. It was pretty far, and I could hear the sounds of fighting and see harpies circling. I thought of Valen and felt a moment's fear. We'd wasted too much time. We had to get up there, fast, and when I remembered how slow and strenuous it had been to carry Tomi a couple hundred feet across thin air, I knew I needed to do something different now. "Hold still, Deeks. I'm going to try something."

Deekin made the mistake of looking down, which set off another fit of nervous tremors. "Uh. Okay. W-what?"

I put a hand on his shoulder and poured every thought of fog I had into him. "This," I said, and as I said it, I saw the little bard start to dissolve and come apart, and heard my own voice fading.

The thermals buoyed me up. I looked around and saw a vaguely kobold-shaped wisp. _"Holy shit, I can't believe that actually worked,"_ I said without a voice.

The kobold-shaped wisp darted around like a hummingbird. _"COOL!"_ I heard-not-heard it say. _"Look at Deekin! He be a little fluffy cloud!"_

A faint ripple of relief ran through me. " _Only you, Deeks_."

" _Only Deekin what_?"

" _Only you could be freaking out one second and having the time of your life the next."_ I thought of Valen, and my relief was replaced by distant worry, muted by my misty state but still there. " _Come on._ _You can play later_ ," I told the swooping little cloud. " _Let's go help the others_."

The kobold-cloud swirled. " _Right-o, Boss_." Then it streamed upwards.

I followed, rising above the cliff's edge into cooler air, to see how the fight was going.

It could, I reflected, have been worse. Valen had found cover under a mushroom tree and was using it to keep harpies from sneaking up behind him or dropping on his head, although he was still beset and was mostly on defense. Now and again Quarra's crossbow sang out, although I couldn't see her.

I tried to take a quick enemy head count, but the damn things were swooping around so fast and high that it was impossible to keep track of them. This reminded me of the time our camp down in Chult had gotten buzzed by a bunch of goddamn pterodactyls – and _that_ gave me an idea. _"Deeks!"_ I called out. " _Give 'em something to chase!_ " I thought for a second, then added, " _As long as it's not you_!"

" _On it, Boss_!" Cloud-Deekin streaked across the ground and swirled under the bole of a mushroom tree, hesitating. _"Uh. How does Deekin, you know, stop beings a cloud and start beings a kobold again?"_

I considered explaining, decided it would take too much time, and settled on the easiest, most Deekin-friendly instructions that came to mind. _"Think of Tymofarrar after a big meal."_

 _"_ _Ooh, yeah, old Boss get real fat and slow when he-"_ An instant later, Deekin re-materialized and plopped to the ground, staggering a little. "Hey, that worked! Thanks, Boss!" His beady eyes sought and found the harpies. "A-ha! One distraction, comin' up!" His cymbals shone as he unhooked them from his pack and started banging them arrhythmically. "Huzzah!" he shrieked, and with a final clash, a bunch of Deekins popped into existence.

I stared. I'd been expecting a bunch of perfect mirror images, like last time, but Deekin must have been working on his spell, because now the Deekins were all different. One was bright pink and had tiny, translucent butterfly wings. Another was gold, like Ferron. Then there was a bright blue one with feathers, and a red one with spikes on his tail, and a white one with ice on his horns, but if they had anything in common, it was the way they sparkled, as if they'd been sprinkled with faerie dust. "Deekin!" they all screamed, and ran out onto the open field, hooting and hollering while behind them the original Deekin hummed a scratchy tune and vanished.

The first harpy to sight the Deekins did a double-take, swiveling in midair with her wings curling around her. Then she gasped and pointed. "Shiny!" she screamed, and fell into a stoop. "Shiny meat! Sisters! Come!"

Other harpies turned, and they, too, went after the Deekins, converging on the illusionary kobolds like a flock of magpies.

Movement caught my eye, and I looked to see a harpy flash by Valen on her way to the party. His eyes followed her, flaring red for a moment, and all at once he was off, charging after her and shaking his flail loose.

The harpy looked behind her and swerved, cackling. "Catch!" she croaked, and dashed away, staying just high enough to stay out of reach and just low enough to be taunting.

Valen's eyes narrowed, then he pushed himself into an even faster sprint and, with a powerful leap, exploded into the air, whirling his flail over his head like a really big bolas.

The harpy saw him coming and scoffed. "Hah! Stupid m-" She jerked, then stalled in midair, backwinging desperately as she suddenly found a flail wrapped around her leg. She struggled to rise. "No fair!" she complained.

Valen was standing underneath her, holding onto his flail with both hands, keeping her tethered with his weight alone. He looked up, and I couldn't tell whether he was grinning or snarling, but either way it was obvious that the Cager Complaints Department was _not_ open for business today, because his only response to her words was to throw his whole body into a savage heave that slam-dunked his opponent right into the ground.

Bones cracked, but the harpy wasn't out, just down. She gave him a blood-flecked grin, her leg and wing both bent at unnatural angles. "Give us a kiss," she croaked.

Valen stared at her. Then he hauled back and punched her in the face so hard that her head snapped back.

 _Guess that was a 'no',_ I mused, and looked on as Valen retrieved his flail and followed up his punch with a big hunk of metal to the kisser.

Then I looked up, and from the scrum of harpies surrounding Deekin's doppelgangers, I saw another harpy peel off and head Valen's way – going for his exposed back. Deekin's distraction had worked, but only long enough for the harpies to tear apart his illusions and find themselves empty-handed.

I couldn't shout a warning, not in this form. That left me with only one option: direct intervention.

I thought of lead. Flesh spun back around me. I hit the ground running. "Shit shit shit," I panted. Enserric came up. I stopped long enough to wrench him out of the rock. A little flash of light came from the blade, a little spark, and he was free.

 _Where is she?_ After a too-long heartbeat, I caught sight of her – _there_! – stooping into a dive. I drew breath and power into my lungs and broke into a sprint. The world slowed and blurred and stretched in a thoroughly unnatural way, as if I'd somehow sidestepped the normal flow of time.

The harpy had folded her wings and fallen into a dive. I saw afterimages of her stretching out into the air, ahead and behind, future and past. I eyed the distance between us and gauged her angle and adjusted mine for an intercept course.

I looked up. She was still high. _I need height._ A yank and swirl of air made a midair step for me to leap onto, then another, and then I was high enough and close enough to propel myself with a last leap, sword out and swinging, and for a second, Enserric almost looked like a talon, long and black and glittering.

The harpy must have heard me coming, because all of a sudden she slowed down and twisted and looked up, her wingbeats stuttering in surprise.

 _Mistake,_ I thought, and fell on her like a bird of prey.

Enserric cleaved her wing off. Blood fountained up and near-blinded me, a hot salt splatter. She hit the ground without a sound.

My boots touched the ground several seconds later. I stumbled and almost fell, caught up in the violent shivers of Enserric's spell, but before I could even start to recover my senses, my vision doubled, taking on that weird crystalline overlay.

Two distinct scenes showed themselves to my befuddled eyes, one on top of the other, and they looked like this:

On camera one: a dead harpy. On camera two: a flying and very much living harpy, coming in fast on my unguarded back.

I blinked and shook my head like a stunned bull, trying and failing to make sense of the conflicting sights. Through the cold and confusion, I barely registered Enserric's shout. "Behind you, wielder!"

 _Wha?_ was all I had time to think, and then the mystery resolved itself as I was cannonballed by about a hundred and twenty pounds of seriously pissed-off bird-woman.

I flew backwards. My back hit the ground, forcing the air out of my lungs with a 'whoof!'. Before I could get my wits back, a heavy weight was pressing me down. Claws scrabbled against metal, trying to find a way through my scales to my guts, and when they couldn't get through, they went for my eyes.

Drogan's training kicked in. I raised my forearms in front of my face, crossing them with my armored vambraces facing out. The harpy pushed and grabbed and gouged furiously, seeking a way through my guard, and one talon made it, cutting a stinging scoring track across my temple and yanking out a few strands of hair. Arms shaking from the effort of fending her off, I bucked beneath her, trying to throw her off by some means or another because I knew that as long as she had me down it was only a matter of time before she put me down for good.

Through the mayhem of our little cat fight, a sound came through: running footsteps, coming up fast and hard.

Quickly, so quickly it shocked me, my mind ticked through the possibilities. _Can't be a harpy. They fly. Can't be Deekin. Too big. Can't be Quarra. Too loud._ That only left one possibility. _Oh, thank fuck._

I caught an approaching blur of red and green from the corner of my eye, and I lowered my arms just in time to get a front row seat to the spectacle of a tiefling taking a flying bodytackle at a harpy.

Bodies collided noisily. A split second later, the harpy's weight was gone, the air above me was blessedly empty, and the sounds of complicated violence were happening somewhere close by. Metal rattled. Bone splintered. Cartilage cracked. Someone gurgled for breath through a ruined throat, then fell silent.

I scrambled to my feet, swiping blood out of my eyes with a hand that shook with adrenaline. My eyes fell on Valen. He was straightening from the newly-made corpse, flinging blood and worse from his flail with a practiced snap of his arm. His armor…well, that would probably have to wait until we found a bucket of water, or maybe a fire hose. "How much of that is yours?" I asked.

"What?" The weapon master looked at me, then looked down at himself. "Oh. The blood. No, 'tis all theirs." He looked back up at me and frowned. "You?"

I mopped my forehead. My hand came away bright red. I wiped it on my armor, for lack of any better options. "Just my forehead. Looks worse than it is."

His shoulders relaxed a little. "Good. Deekin?"

"Fine. Hiding." I caught my breath, then added a thoroughly inadequate, "Thanks. I owe you one."

Valen shrugged, though the tense way his eyes searched the sky belied his casual tone. "De nada."

 _Quick learner_. I grinned through a veil of blood. It tasted revolting, but I was coasting so high on the adrenaline rush that I barely noticed.

Then a winged shadow flickered over us, scattering my thoughts and amping my adrenaline high up another level still.

The next thing I knew, Valen and I were standing back-to-back. I didn't even remember which of us had moved first, or maybe we'd just moved in unison, acting on instinct. Nor did I remember whipping a wall of wind all around us, like an invisible shower curtain, but it happened. Above, harpies fought their way through it. They were too big for it to stop them, but at least it was slowing them down. Unfortunately, it seemed like every single harpy in the area was coming our way, wind wall or no wind wall.

 _Why are they all after us all of the sudden?_ I looked at Enserric, glittering brightly, then at my armor, patches of polished scales showing through the blood, then craned my head to look at Valen's armor, which was shinier still despite a significant smearing of gore. I looked up. Several harpies had gathered. "Oh, shit."

Armor clinked as Valen looked over his shoulder at me. "What?"

"We're shiny."

There was a pensive pause. Then: "Hellfire. You are right."

"Happens. Try not to act so surprised." I sighted a harpy from the corner of my eye. "To your left!"

I heard the angry heavy metal rattle of Valen's flail, a thud, a scream, and another thud. The tiefling resumed his position at my back. "Thank you."

"No problem. Where's Quarra?"

"I told her to find cover."

"That's a good idea. Why aren't we doing it?"

The accents of the Cage asserted themselves with a vengeance. "Because some barmy priestess took a dice and decided to crash-land a harpy into an open field, that is w-" He broke off. An armored shoulder bumped mine lightly. "To your right."

We both turned. I lifted a hand and sent a surge of air at the oncoming harpy, knocking her off-kilter. Valen's flail knocked her the rest of the way to the ground.

The harpy died, thrashing. Valen and I resumed our positions and our conversation. "Hey, I have an idea."

"Which is?"

"Instead of calling me crazy, why don't you thank me for saving your ass?"

Valen paused. "Point taken. Very well. Thank you."

"You're welcome. Why'd you do that, anyway?"

"Do what?"

"Charge out here to fly a harpy like a goddamn kite, that's what."

A creak of leather and metal hinted at a shrug. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

I laughed. "They're gonna carve that on our tombstones, aren't they?"

"What is that?"

"' _Seemed like a good idea at the time_ '."

Valen's laugh was a short, sharp bark. "That assumes that there will be enough of us left to bury."

"Why? Do harpies eat corpses?"

"No."

"Oh. So why did you say-"

"They eat their prey alive."

Come to think of it, those ladies up there _did_ look kind of hungry. "You're just full of good news today, aren't you?"

"You did ask."

I couldn't argue with that, even though I really wanted to. "True enough." Winged shadows formed a wide ring around us. Harpies hooted over our heads. I twisted my hands around Enserric's hilt, settling my grip. We'd been lucky so far, but with each harpy that rushed us, our luck ran the risk of running out. "Any bright ideas for how we're gonna get out of this?"

"Yes. Shoot them with lightning until they stop moving."

I gnawed my lower lip. Mushrooms were one thing, but flying targets? "You think I can pull it off?"

Valen's voice was so steady it would have withstood an earthquake. "I know you can."

The bottle of lightning was already in my hands. I didn't remember taking it out, but now I turned it over, looking at the fizzing, dancing sliver of white light inside it. "All right," I said, and blew out an anxious breath. "All right. Here goes."

Valen's voice was all business. "What do you need me to do?"

I dipped down deep into my power and placed my thumb on the cork. "Keep them off me."

The alert tension suddenly coming off of him was almost palpable. "Then they shall not reach you, I promise you that."

I nodded and tried to clear my mind, feeding every distracting thought and emotion into an imaginary green flame, the way Xanos had taught me. It was easier than usual, with Valen standing at my back, warm and solid and rock-steady. If Mister Debbie Downer himself thought I could do this, then maybe I could – and if there was anyone I'd rather have watching my back on a battlefield, right then, I couldn't think of them.

A blank calm fell over me, just for an instant, but it was all I needed. I opened my eyes and thumbed the cork out of the bottle's neck.

Lightning jumped out, and I grabbed it by the throat before it had gone too far. I looked for the nearest harpy, found her, and let slip my hound of electric war.

A bar of white light, irregular and spasming, formed between me and the harpy, instantaneous as thought. She didn't make a sound – that was the weird thing. Maybe it all happened too quick, or maybe it knocked the breath out of her. I felt a moment's sympathy, but then I thought of Deekin being carried away to be made into a harpy's lunch, and my sympathy passed faster than a bowl of five-alarm chili laced with prescription-strength laxatives.

An interesting thing was happening overhead. The first harpy was spasming violently in midair, transfixed by lightning, and the other harpies had been too busy circling and taunting to notice her predicament until they were almost piled on top of her, at which point they all backwinged frantically, their cries of alarm echoing through the cavern.

I looked at the harpies, now clustered nice and close together. _Well, isn't that convenient?_ Then I let the lightning jump from one to the other until they were all joined together by a chain of crackling electricity, like a conga line that had accidentally wandered onto the third rail of a subway track.

Bodies rained down, bucking and sparking, _one-two-three-four-five_ , _thud-thud-thud-thud-thud_.

The sixth harpy spiraled to the ground next to a cluster of mushroom trees, alive but with smoke streaming from her wings and blisters all over her skin. Her screams were ear-splitting, as if she wanted to hurt my eardrums as bad as I'd hurt her.

Valen stepped to my side. "Five harpies are counting worms, and one is wounded, it would seem," he observed.

Behind the screaming harpy, a shadow detached itself from the trees and resolved itself into Quarra. The drow scout had a throwing spear in her hand. She cast it.

The harpy's screaming stopped abruptly. She staggered back and stared down at the spear sticking out of her abdomen, right beneath her ribs, as if surprised to see it there. She probably was, but before she could express her surprise, her eyes glazed over, and she toppled backwards. The abrupt cessation of her screams made my ears ring almost as badly as the screaming had.

Valen raised an eyebrow. "Make that six harpies counting worms." He scanned the sky. "And I think that was all of them."

My adrenaline rush was gone, and the shakes had set in. I sat down heavily. "I can't believe I just did that."

Valen shrugged. "Believe it or do not. The fact remains that you did it."

I laughed shortly. "So I did." I wiped my forehead with the back of a shaking hand. _I have lightning again._ Relief was making me dizzy, or maybe that was just exhaustion.

Running footsteps intruded. "Boss!" came a screech, and before I knew what was happening, I had my arms full of kobold. "Boss! Are you okay? You be covered in blood! Do you needs a potion? Deekin gots some potions here-"

I put a hand on the bard's skinny wrist, stopping him in mid-reach – for _my_ potions bag, of course, probably because it would have taken him half an hour to find anything in _his_ bag. "I'm fine," I reassured him. I gave him a worried once-over. "The question is, are you? I didn't check. Maybe I should-"

The kobold made a 'pfft' sound of dismissal. "Deekin be fine." Then he looked at me and sniffed and blinked and threw his arms around my neck. "Thanks, Boss," he mumbled into my shoulder. "Deekin got pretty scared there, for a minute."

I patted his back and forced a light-hearted tone past the lump in my throat. "But you're okay now, so that's okay, right?"

Deekin pushed away from me and grinned. "That be true." He brightened even further. "And just waits until Deekin write this all down!" He rubbed his hands together. "This book gonna sell like hot cakes, and Deekin gonna be the richest and most famousest kobold ever."

I didn't answer, but I did stare meditatively into the distance and wonder if it was too late to feed him to a harpy.

Quarra drew near, stopping along the way to yank her spear from a corpse. "Path's blocked," she told Valen. She didn't so much as a glance in my direction. "Either we turn back or go around. I say turn back."

Relief welled up and ran head-on into guilt. Maybe I didn't have to go to Zorvak'mur after all. _And I'm a terrible person for thinking that._ People were counting on me. I needed to stop looking for a way out. "Isn't there another way to get there?" I made myself ask.

Quarra shrugged. "Yes, but no telling how that shake changed things. Could be the other route's as bad as this. Maybe worse. Could be blocked. Could have unearthed something nasty."

Valen was frowning. "How much longer is the other way?"

"Two cycles, if we live." Quarra's voice was flat. "Forever, if we die."

The two of them kept talking, discussing options and alternatives and fallbacks. I pressed the heels of my hands to my temples, problems clogging my head until it felt close to bursting. Harpies and mindflayers and cave-ins and conspiracies and lava _and lions and tigers and bears, oh my_. Also, my adrenaline rush was gone and I couldn't seem to stop shaking.

 _First things first: just breathe._ I focused on that. It helped, but I needed more help than a little deep breathing. My hand reached for my holy symbol. _Shaundakul,_ I called, casting the thought out to the ether and into that place in my mind where he resided. _I need you._

Almost as soon as the words left my head, the wind picked up. Its far-off howl held a faint question.

I sagged in relief. _Thanks for coming._ Not that he was ever really far away. _So. I'll be quick. You've seen what's happening._ What his Windwalkers saw, he saw. What we knew, he knew. _You know I don't want to be here, but I'm here and I have to help, because we're the last bastion against the Valsharess, and if we fall, she'll be free to grind the whole damn world under her heel. I don't want that. I didn't want Heurodis to do it, I don't want this bitch to do it, and I know you don't, either._

I paused to reflect on that thought. It was a little strange to think of me and Shaundakul that way, a little new, but it felt right, somehow. I'd never really believed in much, but if I believed in anything at all, it was that people should be free to make their own choices and live their own lives without anybody telling them what to do. They were even free to hurt other people, because free will didn't mean a damn thing without the freedom to make bad decisions. Of course, the flipside of that was that anyone who went around hurting people had best be ready to get a boot up their ass, because there was a special place in Hell for bullies and sadists and tyrants. And I supposed that if I had faith in anything, it was that Shaundakul felt the same as I did, because it was just like he'd said: I was one of his kind.

It was funny. I'd never really thought about things that way, but now that I had, I wondered how I hadn't seen it before. It was so obvious. _I know you want me to help these people. So, please, if you think I'm on the right track, give me a hand, and show me a safe way to Zorvak'mur._ I thought for a moment, then added, _Amen, or whatever._

Then I let go of my holy symbol, folded my hands in my lap, and waited. The shakes were subsiding, thankfully, and I felt almost calm.

Valen and Quarra were still speaking, but after a few moments Valen broke off in mid-sentence and looked at me. He frowned, his eyes darting from side to side as if he'd sensed the change in my demeanor and was looking for the reason. "What is it?"

I shrugged. "I asked Shaundakul to help us."

Valen's expression hardened into skepticism, tinged lightly with disapproval. "And will he?"

Even his attitude barely ruffled the strange tranquility that had fallen over me – although it _was_ one hell of an attitude. "Sure he will. He likes you guys." I smirked. "Shaundakul always bets on the underdog." Then the wind changed again, and with it, there came a sudden sense of _presence_ , as if something – or someone – else was suddenly there with us.

For a split second, the light in the cavern dimmed, like a cloud had just passed in front of the sun, only there was no sun, just glowing lava and subterranean shadow. My smirk widened. "Hi," I said loudly. "Glad you could make it, old man."

Valen had stiffened noticeably, and his head turned this way and that, his eyes searching for something unseen, as if he'd picked up on Shaundakul's presence, too. Maybe his planar spidey senses were acting up. "What-"

I held up a hand. Valen fell silent. I cocked my head, listening. Somewhere up high, something was rustling. A lot of somethings, from the sound of it.

Quarra had heard it, too. Her hand went to her crossbow. "What is that?"

I squinted, trying to see. "Help." Then a smidgeon of doubt crept in, and honesty forced me to add, "Probably."

Then, with the sound like the rustling of hundreds of leathery little wings and a chorus of squeaks so high-pitched they were almost clicks, a cloud detached itself from the ceiling and came down in a living flood.

The cloud whooshed by. I craned my head to watch it go. I caught a glimpse of lots of tiny, furry, leathery-winged bodies. There were hundreds of them, or so it seemed, enough that the wind of their passage made my hair stir. I laughed, delighted.

The bat cloud flew past us, and when it reached an open spot on the riverbank, it stopped and swirled and did some kind of chaotic internal rearrangement that made the whole cloud change its shape into…

Quarra's forehead wrinkled. "Is that a hand?"

I grinned. "Yep." As a matter of fact, the bats hadn't just formed a hand, they'd formed a pointing hand, and the index finger was pointing insistently towards – I checked my internal compass – the west. I touched my holy symbol. _Thanks, old man. I'll do my best not to disappoint._

The wind kissed my cheek in a way that felt half affection and half benediction. Then the sense of _presence_ faded, and I was…not alone, because I was never that, but Shaundakul had clearly done what he came for, and I was just as clearly expected to take it from here.

 _Playtime's over, I guess._ I stood up, grinning in spite of the muscle strains that were making themselves known now that they weren't being masked by adrenaline. "Ask, and ye shall receive." I pointed at the cloud. "Follow those bats. They know where to go."

Deekin was scribbling madly. "This is _so cool_!"

Valen's mouth was hanging open. He shut it with a snap. Then he spoke. "Very well." His voice was even. "We are being guided by bats. I suppose I have seen stranger things." He lowered his voice to a mutter. "Though not by much."

Quarra frowned a few moments longer, then shrugged and heeled her lizard forward. "Maybe you're not completely useless," she told me as she passed.

Coming from her, that was practically a standing ovation. "Thanks so much," I said, and staggered off after the bats.


	46. Zorvak'mur

_"_ _Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving."_

\- Albert Einstein

~*~  
Chapter 46: Zorvak'mur  
~*~

We stood at the mouth of the cavern that held Zorvak'mur and looked on the illithid city for the first time.

There wasn't much to see. There were no living things in sight. Several hundred feet away stood an immense, ring-shaped platform which hovered in the air with no apparent foundation to hold it up. Other rings were just visible, rising above the first like steps and peppered with disturbingly bulbous structures. In the center of it all stood a dome. The dome was gray and pink-veined and I would have liked to call it marble, except that it looked damp and vaguely translucent and altogether too organic to be stone.

A long, winding ramp led up to the first ring. It was slightly wider at one end than the other. "Is it just me, or does that ramp look kind of like a tentacle?" I asked.

Deekin stared upwards. "Yeah, Deekin was kinda hoping you not gonna say that."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, just don't say that word."

"What word? Tentacle?"

" _Bo-oss_!"

"Oops. Sorry."

Valen was speaking to Quarra. "You know what to do," he said. "Wait as long as you can, but if we do not return in the allotted time, consider us lost." He said it with hair-raising calm, as if contemplating his own enslavement and death was old hat, for him. "Do you remember the way back?"

Quarra scowled at her superior officer. "You need to ask?"

Valen lifted an eyebrow, surprisingly calm in the face of Quarra's insubordination. Then again, she wasn't just any drow – she was someone he knew and trusted, and with Valen, that seemed to breed enormous tolerance. After all, he hadn't strangled Imloth yet. "No. You are right. I do not," he said, and stepped away, the worry that _should_ have been there before finally showing on his face now. "Remain vigilant. I do not like leaving you alone in this place without someone to watch your back, but I do not see that we have much choice."

Quarra shrugged. "I'll be fine." Her grin wouldn't have looked out of place on a pirate flag. "I'm not the one playing with the tentacle-heads." Then she saluted him, fist to chest, and wheeled her lizard around in a tight circle. "Don't get him killed, priestess," she cast over her shoulder.

I slanted her a sardonic look. "I couldn't help but notice you didn't mention anything about _me_ dying."

Quarra waved a hand in either farewell or dismissal. She didn't bother to turn around. "We need him. We don't need you."

I watched her go. "She's all love, isn't she?"

Valen shrugged. "At least she is no longer insulting you."

 _Really? "Cause telling me I could feel free to crawl off and die doesn't sound like a compliment to me._ I thought about arguing with him. Then I remembered Enserric's comment about how me and Valen kept yowling at each other like a pair of cats in heat, and I bit my tongue. To give myself something to do other than talk, I settled the greenstone circlet more securely on my head. Crowns really weren't made for people with curly hair. My hair couldn't decide whether to forcibly eject the thing or permanently entangle it, so as a compromise it was trying to do both at once. "How do I look?"

Valen looked at me. "R-"

I pointed a forefinger at him. "The next word out of your mouth had better not be 'rich'."

"-regal."

"Ooh. _Nice_ save."

Valen's face was as straight as a plank. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." I kept my own face straight and adjusted my circlet again. I'd expected it to tingle or burn or do _something_ special when I put it on, but it just sat there. Maybe this wearing-magic-items thing wasn't so bad. Or maybe the trader had sold us a mundane piece of jewelry and we were all about to die. "So if I'm a slave trader, what are you two?" I was stalling. I knew I was stalling. I just wished I knew how to make myself stop.

Valen shrugged. "We are your thralls."

I frowned. "Most humans down here are slaves." The words left a bitter taste in my mouth. The truth often did. "Will the illithid believe that I'm the one in charge?"

"To a mindflayer, all other races are thralls. They do not differentiate."

"Right. So why aren't _you_ wearing this thing?" Valen gave me a long look, then pointed wordlessly to his horns. I blinked. "Oh. Uh. You have a point." He had two of them, actually, and they were both on his head, seriously impeding his use of headgear.

Deekin piped up. "Deekin could make Boss look like a drow, if you wants." He grinned. "Deekin been practicing his illusions. He can make Boss look like _anything._ Well, almost anything."

Valen frowned suspiciously. "You are able to cast spells of Seeming?

"Sure thing!" The bard paused. A wincing little grimace of embarrassment curled his snout. "Er. Although…"

I didn't like the sounds of that. "Although?"

The bard fidgeted with his quill. "Deekin been practicing lots on himself, but other people? Ummm. Not so much."

I remembered Teddy and his experiments and that one time he'd accidentally fixed an illusion on Hana that made her look like an ogress for about a week. At least, I was pretty sure it had been an accident. You could never quite tell, with Teddy. "That's all right, Deeks. I think I'll stick with being human."

"Yes." Valen's voice was emphatic. "This spell seems like a terrible idea. Let us not try it."

Deekin had no lips, but he still somehow managed to pout, or at least to convey the general impression of pouting. "Aw, c'mon." His fingers moved, and he started to hum. "Here. It not be so hard. Deekin even shows you!"

I didn't feel a thing. "Show me what?" Then I looked down at my hands. My eyes bulged a little. My skin had gone from tanned olive to ebony. I felt a visceral horror, seeing a stranger's hands where mine had been. Then I studied my hands a little longer. Was it me, or did my hands look more graceful now? My horror faded. "Wow. That's wild." I took a lock of hair between my thumb and forefinger and stretched the corkscrew curl out until I could just see it. It had gone from dark brown to bone-white. I dropped the lock and looked up. "What do you think? How do I look?"

Valen was wearing a distinctly unflattering expression of horror. "Wrong. Utterly and absolutely wrong."

On second thought, maybe he wasn't so smooth after all. "Gee, thanks. Nice to know I'm hideous."

Valen's face went red. "That was not…" He stammered to a stop, opened his mouth a couple of times, and tried again. "I did not mean…" He broke off. His eyes fell on something behind me. His face tightened. His voice turned urgent. "Rebecca."

I froze. The look on his face said it all. "There's one of them behind me, isn't there?" Valen nodded. I swallowed hard and turned. The blood drained from my face. " _Oh sweet mother of god_."

A mindflayer was floating towards us like a ghastly balloon. It was close to seven feet tall if I was any judge, but it was skeletally thin. Most of it was mercifully covered in a black and purple robe that was all angles and points, but the robe didn't hide its slimy purplish-gray skin, the sunken sockets of its eyes, or the fact that its face was tentacles.

Silently, the illithid drifted closer. I stared. _Its face is tentacles_. I was screaming on the inside, and it was only by some miracle of adrenaline and Valen's steadying presence next to me that I wasn't also screaming on the _outside_.

The illithid came closer. _Its face is tentacles._ I'd seen a lot of shit since coming to this world, and I'd thought I'd gotten pretty good at dealing with it, but this… _this_ was too much. My nerve strained, close to breaking.

The illithid had almost reached us. _Its face is tentacles._ The tentacles writhed and twitched hungrily as the illithid came near, and I remembered, at exactly the wrong moment, that they used those tentacles to suck out people's brains, just stuck the things up your nose and in your ears and _shloomp._ My nose wrinkled, and I blew a sharp breath out of my nostrils, as if to dislodge an imaginary tentacle. I couldn't help myself. It was instinct, instructions arriving straight from my hindbrain in a desperate attempt to protect my forebrain.

The illithid stopped a few feet away. Its sunken eyes stared at me, devoid of any expression that I could read.

Then its mind reached out and touched mine, and my stomach heaved. I could _feel_ it probing my mind, looking for a way in, like a finger poking at the membrane bounding my brain. I had to lock every muscle from my jaw to my gut to stop a shudder.

The pressure on my mind increased. I felt a moment's unreasoning terror, blind and paralyzing. Then the circlet went ice-cold on my forehead, and the mental pressure lifted abruptly. The mindflayer recoiled. I felt a flicker of… _is that confusion_? I couldn't tell if it was the illithid's or mine. I was plenty confused already, and there was no reading the emotions on that alien face, if this thing even had emotions to begin with.

There was a pause. Then a strange voice filled my head. That wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part was that the voice was almost…pleasant. Cultured. Civil, if a touch disdainful. _These are the caverns of Zorvak'mur,_ the illithid said inside my head _._ _What business do you have here?_

My jaw was clenched too tightly to speak. I pried it open. "I've come to buy slaves from your auctions." That was our cover, at least. The last thing we needed was for word to get out that Lith My'athar was trying to negotiate the mindflayers out of the alliance the Valsharess had negotiated them into.

The illithid regarded me in a way that almost seemed thoughtful, though its alien face and sunken eyes were impossible to truly read. That probing sensation returned, then darted back at another flare from my circlet. Tentacles twitched _. I might let you in, but your thoughts are hidden to me._ A long, four-fingered hand lifted, delicately pointing at the circlet on my head. _You will have to remove that…item before I will allow you entry._

My thoughts were hidden? _Oh, my god. I think this thing on my head is working_. I started to breathe again, and found a little steel to put into my voice, fucked if I knew how. "No deal. I'm here to buy slaves, not become one."

The mindflayer's tentacles writhed. A strange gurgling sound came from beneath. It took me a moment to realize that it was laughing. _You cannot blame me for trying_ , it spoke into my head, as if I'd found it leaving a whoopee cushion on my chair instead of trying to trick me into letting it destroy my mind. _Very well, you may keep the enchantment that protects your mind. I will allow you to enter Zorvak'mur._ _But know that the Elder Brain is aware of your presence and knows your thoughts, even if they are strangely muted to me._

I wanted to nod, but I was too petrified to even do that, so I settled for staring blankly ahead and uttering a curt, grim, "Understood."

The illithid didn't nod or bow. It just turned, and, without another word or even any sign of acknowledgement, it drifted away.

I waited, my back straight and every muscle in my body tensed, until the illithid was safely out of sight. Then I sagged. My knees almost buckled. "Fuck," I gasped.

A hand cupped my elbow, steadying me. "What did it say?" Valen asked softly.

I gulped for breath. "I t-think that was the w-welcoming committee." The quaver in my voice was humiliating, but it wouldn't go away. "It…it tried to get into my head."

Valen grunted. "Hell of a welcome."

"I know." I tried to grin. It came out a lopsided, sickly thing. "G-guess they were all out of fruit baskets."

Valen laughed. It was grim and brief, but it was a laugh. His posture eased a little, and he took his hand away from my elbow, as if he felt like he no longer needed to hold me up. "Fortunately, it seems that your mind is still very much your own."

I hoped he was right. "How can you be sure?"

His voice was wry. "Because only you would say such a thing."

I laughed, too. A little. Then I looked down, because I wasn't supposed to be laughing at his jokes. My eyes fell on my hands. They'd gone back to looking human, at some point – not that it really mattered, in hindsight. If something could look into my head, what did the color of my skin or the shape of my hands matter?

Deekin's arms wrapped around my calf. "What did the mindflayer say?" the bard asked anxiously. "Did it lets us in?"

"When it couldn't break in, it tried to talk me into taking off the circlet." I swallowed. "And when _that_ didn't work, it agreed to let us in." I straightened. A droplet of sweat trickled down my spine. It wasn't the first of its kind. The back of my blouse was stuck to my skin. _I've been here for five minutes, and already I need a bath and a drink._ "Let's go get this over with. The less time we spend here, the better."

Valen's voice was soft but fervent. "Agreed."

Deekin still hadn't let go of my leg. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to walk with him attached to me like that, but I didn't have the heart to tell him to stop. Besides, the contact was comforting, and I needed all the comfort I could get.

The ramp up to the city was steep and made of stone. It was paved with tiny mosaic tiles in swirling patterns that I was trying really hard not to think of as 'like tentacles'. We reached the head of the ramp and paused. "Which way?" I wondered.

Valen spread his hands. "You are the wayfinder, not I."

All I'd done was find religion, and suddenly everybody was mistaking me for somebody who knew what she was doing. I looked around. We were standing on an elevated circular road. It was as wide as several avenues put together. More ramps led up towards a second, inner ring, like spokes on a wheel. That one held the central dome, which loomed over everything, but further along this ring, I saw smaller domes that hinted at the existence of buildings – and where there were buildings, there might be people, and where there were people, there might be answers. "Let's just walk around, see what we can find," I decided. As far as decisions went, it wasn't exactly earth-shattering, but Valen and Deekin followed me without protest, so it couldn't have been too bad.

The street was silent, but not empty. People of all descriptions filled it - drow and duergar, surface elves and dwarves, humans and half-elves and half-orcs, and even a few halflings. It would have been inspiring to see so many people from so many different races all living together in peace, if not for the fact that every single one of them had the vacant stare of lobotomy patients. Mind flayers drifted among them, outnumbered but unmolested. They ignored us completely, not even responding when I tried to stop them to ask directions.

I passed a human woman - dark-haired, thin, and dressed in the remnants of a cotton dress. Her bodice was torn wide open, leading to a wardrobe malfunction that would have made most women gasp and clutch fabric to their chests and scurry for cover, but this woman neither noticed nor cared. All of her attention was devoted to methodically dipping a mop into a bucket of steaming water, flopping the dripping mop-head from bucket to pavement, and mopping the street. _Dip. Flop. Mop._ Blood was trickling out of her nose. Her face was blank. I tried to talk to her anyway. "Excuse me?"

 _Dip. Flop. Mop._ Soapy water slopped onto the pavement. The woman didn't pause, didn't even look at me. Deekin tugged my hand. "She not be there, Boss," he whispered. "Her mind be gone. She won't say anything. She probably not even understand what _you_ be saying."

I stared at the woman and felt my jaw clench. This was worse than slavery. At least slaves still had their minds. These people didn't have even that. _And there isn't a damn thing I can do about it._ Even if I killed every mind flayer here, it still wouldn't bring these people back, and what good would it do to free a few hundred people here if it let the Valsharess win and enslave hundreds of thousands more?

A hand settled on my shoulder. "Easy," Valen's voice murmured.

I turned my head to glare at Valen. My jaw jutted out belligerently. I was in no mood to be calmed, and less to be lectured, though I was definitely spoiling for a nice little fight. " _What_?" I snapped.

For once, Valen didn't take the bait. "Do not 'what' at me. I know that look."

Those baby blues were too much. They saw right through me, as clear and cutting as crystals. I returned my stare to the dead woman. Oh, she was breathing and she was walking, but in all the ways that mattered, she was dead. "What look?"

"The look of someone who wants to lay waste to everything and everyone around them." His voice hardened. "I know how you feel, but it is because I know how you feel that I am telling you that you need to walk away, Rebecca. Only a fool picks a fight with the illithid on their own turf, and I did not take you for a fool."

I shook my head and blinked back tears and half-flung a helpless hand at the woman. " _Look_ at her."

His voice was steel-lined and steel-braced. "I am looking. And I like it no more than you do. But she is beyond saving. They all are. And if we join them, we will not only have failed them, but we will have failed the Seer, the rebels, and every living sentient in the Valsharess's path."

I breathed and stared and breathed again, fighting back tears. Valen was right. _Damn it._ I took one last, long look at the woman's face. She had laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, now unused. I wondered where she came from, and what her name had been, and whether she had people back home who missed her. I tried my best to fix her face in my memory, because that way at least I knew there'd be one person in the world who remembered her.

Then I stepped aside and walked on, feeling like a fraud. _I'm sorry, Shaundakul_. I hoped he wasn't as disappointed in me as I was. Decent people weren't supposed to turn their backs on people who needed help, but when everybody needed your help and helping one person would hurt another, what were you supposed to do? Some choices were impossible, and some were more impossible than others.

We walked on. Valen's stride started to shift into that ghetto swagger – his hand on the hilt of his flail, his face gone tight and cold, his eyes snapping blue fire, and his whole posture one of barely-restrained aggression. I eyed him sideways. "You're gettin' a little gangsta there, Valen."

He glanced at me, though not for long. Most of his attention was going to monitoring the threats around us – glaring at them, really. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you're acting like you're about to mug somebody. Or start a turf war." After lecturing _me_ about not starting fights, he looked like he was spoiling for one. "Could you maybe tone it down a little?"

The tiefling's voice was strained, and there was a faint ring of red around his irises. "No. I cannot." His eyes scanned the street systematically – _left, right, up, down, repeat._ "This place is making every instinct in me scream that we are in danger."

I kept looking at him. He was flexing his free hand restlessly. The motion was making interesting things happen to his arms, things that made the straps of his arm-guards creak with strain and the black leathers he wore beneath it stretch taut over his biceps. I gulped and looked away. "Fine." I had to stop and clear my throat. "Your instincts aren't wrong, anyway." I wondered if the Elder Brain was watching and listening and peeking into my mind, even now. I hoped not. _Oh, well. If it's seen into my brain, it already knows I'm indecent._ "Just…try to think calm thoughts, okay?" The advice went as well for me as for him.

Valen nodded – oblivious, or so I hoped, to what was really going on in my mind. "I shall try."

The city unspooled before us as we walked around the ring. There weren't many buildings, but there was an auction block. It was big, crowded, and unavoidable, placed as it was smack in the middle of the street. I made my way around the rear of the crowd, hunting for a way through. I didn't want to see this. _Like Valen said. Just walk away._

An illithid hovered at the auctioneer's podium. Slaves of various races were shackled and lined up behind him. One was up on the block now – a woman, dwarven, with her golden braids a rat's nest, her face a mass of bruises and cuts, and her wrists shackled in front of her. She stared straight ahead without deigning to acknowledge the shackles, the mindflayer, or the crowd in front of her. There were drow there, and lizard men, and duergar, and even some folks who looked like orcs, although their skin was more gray than green.

The illithid tapped its gavel. Its voice filled my head. _Up next, a fine thrall of dwarven stock,_ it announced, sounding bored _. Robust and healthy, recently acquired from the deep mines. Equally suited to hard labor or the fighting pits. Bidding starts at one pound-weight of gold, in bars or coins of any denomination._ _Who will start the bidding?_ A duergar man, bulky and square-faced from what I could see of his face through the nose bar of his helmet, raised his hand high. The illithid pointed its gavel at him. _One pound-weight to the duergar in the front. Do I have a bid for one and a half gold pound-weights?_ A drow woman, darkly robed and wearing a circlet not unlike mine, glanced over at the duergar and raised her hand. The illithid pointed at her. _One and a half gold pound-weights from the drow. Do I have two?_ And the auction rolled on, with the dwarven slave's face getting more taut by the bid, and I wondered what Harry would do if he saw this, and suddenly I couldn't keep walking.

Valen stopped, too, when he saw what was happening. "Ah." There was a razor's edge to his voice. "And here we have the auction block."

He'd been a slave once, I remembered, and now it was my turn to put a hand on his shoulder, very slowly, and say, "Easy."

Valen's nostrils flared. "I am fine." His eyes were still faintly red-tinged. "But we should not linger here too long."

I nodded, but didn't move. Harry wouldn't have walked away. Drogan would have found some clever ruse to help these people. Shaundakul wouldn't want me to turn my back on someone who needed help – not if I could help it. And I thought that maybe I _could_ help it. "Can you give me ten minutes? I'm not asking just for shits and giggles. I have an idea."

Valen's eyes cut to one side in thought, then came back to meet mine. He nodded and rolled his shoulders and straightened until he was standing at attention, blank-faced, a soldier in standby mode. "I can do that."

I wasted no time. "All right. Deeks?"

"Yeah, Boss?"

"How much money do we have left?"

The bard paused. When he spoke, his voice was evasive. "Ummm. Some?"

I gritted my teeth. "Don't be a dragon about this, Deeks. Not now. Do we have enough to buy her?"

Valen got really, really tense all of a sudden. " _This_ is your idea?" he hissed.

I kept my eyes on the block and the crowd. "You say only a fool picks a fight with the illithid. Fine. I won't fight. I'll buy these people off of them, fair and square."

The tiefling's tail lashed. "Do we really need to push the ruse this far?"

He was a good person. He really was. "Just trust me on this one, Valen." He'd said he trusted me. How far did his trust go? "Please."

Valen paused. His eyes searched my face. Whatever he saw there, it seemed to convince him. He gave me a slow nod and stepped back a little, ceding ground to me. "Very well. But please tread carefully."

I breathed easier. "I'll try," I promised, and I would have said more, but then I saw the illithid raise its gavel and in my head I heard the unmistakable spiel of an auctioneer wrapping up a bid. _Six_ , it announced. _Six to the…_ Urgently, I stepped forward and stuck my hand high in the air. I was taller than most everybody else there except the lizard men, so I was hard to miss. The illithid's head turned to me. Its tentacles writhed in surprise. _Six and a half. We have six and a half, to the human in the back._

Everybody turned to look. I kept on smiling.

The duergar man put up a brief fight, but his hand stayed down when that walking calamari up there called for seven and a half. The gavel banged down. The illithid announced that winners could make their payments to the Warden and collect their thralls at any time prior to leaving the city, but that departure without payment would cause them to forfeit not only all rights to the merchandise but also, from the tone of Squiddy McSquiderson's telepathic voice, our hosts' limited patience. A skinny goblin thrall stumbled up to me and handed me a claim ticket for the dwarf. I pocketed it and kept going.

The next "item" up for auction, as Cthulu's uglier younger brother put it, was a human teenager, a brown-haired boy who was all elbows and Adam's apple. He'd shit himself at some point. Not recently. No one had bothered to give him a change of clothes. He went for a pound of silver. Nobody wanted the scrawny little shitter. Nobody but me, anyway.

The drow trader tried to outbid me on a surface elf, a red-haired woman with a blue tattoo on her face and one eye missing. Her remaining eye went back and forth between me and the drow like she was trying to choose between death by strangling or death by drowning. I didn't let go of that one, even though she left me ten pounds of gold poorer. I'd heard what drow did to surface elves.

The third was a gnomish woman. She shook like a leaf and tried to pull what was left of her robe around her to protect her modesty until a couple of thralls came up and held her arms so the potential buyers could get a good look at her. Tentacle-face claimed she was a talented alchemist and had the thralls hold her hands up to show that they were intact and unbroken, since this increased her value. The lizard men and duergar and I got into a three-way bidding war. I got the gnome for five and a half.

My hand brushed the goblin thrall's as he gave me my chit for the gnome. I had to fight hard to keep myself from wiping my hand on my pants. The thrall's hand had been clammy, his motions jerky, like it wasn't really _him_ doing the moving. I looked up to see the mindflayer auctioneer watching, but whatever he or she or it was thinking stayed hidden behind its blank black eyes.

Deekin _psst_ 'd at me. "That's it, Boss. That's all the money you got. Sorry."

Valen spoke up. "Use mine."

"You sure?"

"Yes." His red-tinged eyes were glued to the block, his jaw clenched so tight a vein stood out in his temple. "Take it. Use it. Then let us go. I cannot bear to watch this much longer."

"All right." Valen's stash got us an undernourished drow man, a badly beaten but still powerfully muscled human woman with auburn hair that was going white at the temples, and a young human girl with ash blonde hair and a face that looked like it'd be a stunner after a good wash and ten years – and I _really_ didn't like the way that duergar eyed her.

Then my money and ten minutes were up, and I bowed out, taking my chits and my companions with me. "Thanks," I said to them, once I thought we were out of earshot of the rest of the scum. "Really."

Deekin looked a little glum. "Sure thing, Boss. But why we gotta do that?"

"Yes." Valen's voice was flat, and the red flicker in his eyes, not to mention the swift lash of his tail, spoke of a temper on the simmer. "I would like to know that, as well."

That didn't bode well, but I couldn't deal with it in the middle of the street. I looked around. "Not here," I warned. "Let's find somewhere quiet. Then we'll talk."

Valen was silent. Then he nodded grimly. "Lead on."

Some other auction-goers were drifting away from the block. I saw them heading up the street to a large building. Other people were going in and out of the doors of that building, too – people who moved with a purpose and awareness that the thralls here lacked. Better yet, I saw that the mindflayers were all giving that building a wide berth. It seemed like a place where visitors huddled and locals stayed out. _Exactly what I'm looking for, in other words._

The space beyond the double-doors had the look of a tavern and meeting space, although it was barren in a way taverns never were – sparsely furnished, sparsely populated, and way too quiet for what was supposed to be a place of revelry. Everything was made of metal and stone, down to the chairs, and magelights shone from recesses in the ceiling and walls. We got a few looks as we entered. Some were curious, some weren't. None of them were particularly friendly. Valen returned their looks with glares and edged closer to me, hovering protectively.

I looked around. There was an empty bar with a golem behind it, a big silvery fellow with runes painted all over him. He didn't look much like a bartender, but then, Cupron didn't look like a chef, either, so I was willing to keep an open mind. Besides, in my experience the safest place in any bar was near the bartender. Nobody liked to piss off the person who was pouring their drinks. If we hung near him, maybe we'd get some peace and Valen could cool down.

I bellied up to the bar and slid onto a stool. Deekin climbed up onto the stool next to me. Valen remained standing. "Well met," I greeted the golem. "Are you the bartender around here?"

The golem looked down at me. He had a white towel slung over his shoulder. It was pristine. "Seven hundred and forty-nine years, seventeen days, three hours, and fourteen minutes ago, my creator thought this would be a good place to set up a bar," he intoned.

I looked up. I had to crane my neck. "And _was_ it a good place to set up a bar?"

The golem's eye-lights turned on and off in a golem version of a slow blink. "No. You are the first one to ever ask me for service."

Deekin was scribbling busily. "Aw. That be so sad." He elbowed me without looking up from his notes. "Hey, Boss, maybe you could ask him for a drink. Cheer him up a little."

Valen was looking on with great skepticism. "Are you sure that is wise?"

I shrugged. "No, but the poor guy looks so sad, I'll do it anyway."

Valen looked at me as if I'd just shown him my first place ribbon from the 'Who's the Biggest Moron?' contest. "It is a golem."

"So?"

"So it is not capable of feeling sadness."

I smiled thinly. "Tell that to Ferron."

Valen didn't have an immediate answer for that, and after a moment, he shook his head. "Fine. They are your innards. Do as you see fit."

"Thank you, I will." I turned back to the bartender and slapped a hand briskly on the bar. "So. What's on tap?"

Without answering, the golem turned to the lone spigot on the bar, put a glass underneath it, and turned the spigot. There was a long pause. Then something brown came out of the spigot. It went _gloop._

The glass scraped on the stone bar as the golem slid it across to me. "Enjoy," it rumbled morosely.

I stared down at the stuff in the glass. It had green streaks in it. "Thanks." I waited until he'd moved away, then spoke from the corner of my mouth. "I don't suppose either of you guys are willing to help me out here?"

Valen's voice was about as sympathetic as a hole in the head. "No, but if you have a potion of antidote, I can pour it down your throat once you have stopped convulsing."

First Quarra's commentary, and now this. I felt so loved. "Thanks, sunshine."

Valen had this way of quirking an eyebrow and cocking his head and smirking that could have charmed the pants off an ogress. "You are welcome, my lady."

I stared. That smirk was dangerous as hell, and the kicker was that he didn't even seem to know it. It made me prefer Imloth's smiles, in a way. Imloth knew the score. His flirtation was calculated, his charm practiced, and I could see it coming from a mile away, which gave me time to harden my heart against it. Valen, though –there was no defending against his kind of charm, because it was artless and sincere and a girl could never see it coming until it already had her flat on her back.

I realized that I was still staring. _Good move, Rebecca. Stare at the man's lips. Brilliant move._ I tore my eyes away. They fell on the golem. He, or maybe it, was wiping down the pristine bar with his pristine towel, but every so often he looked up at me. There was something hopeful yet dejected about him, like a puppy who was hoping that just this once he was going to get petted instead of kicked. _I can't believe I'm doing this,_ I thought, and raised the glass.

The drink oozed down my throat. It was nothing I'd expected and everything I'd feared. My throat and stomach, quicker on the uptake than my brain, took one look, realized that I was consuming something not fit for human consumption, and rejected it, or tried to. I gagged, choked, and wheezed, all at once. Someone pounded my back. "Breathe," Valen's voice instructed. His tone tagged the statement with an unspoken, ' _You idiot_.'

I tried, but there was this slimy burning feeling all the way from my tongue to my stomach, like I'd just drunk bleach laced with garden slugs. Tears streamed down my face. Was it just me, or were the tears on fire? Maybe it was just me.

The bartender drifted over and mopped up an imaginary spill near my glass. "Did you enjoy your beverage?" he asked hopefully.

I coughed and sniffled and wiped my eyes and spoke in a croak. "'s good."

Fortunately for me, this golem was no better at spotting a lie than any other golem. He beamed. "It is my pleasure to serve." Then he went back to cleaning the spotless counter.

I waited until his back was turned, then pushed the glass away from me. "If either of you say 'I told you so', I'm making you drink the rest of that," I warned.

Deekin finished a sentence with a brisk jab of his quill. "Sure thing, Boss. Hey, could you describes the taste for Deekin? For posterity."

"No, I really can't."

"Awww. C'mon, Boss!"

"Use your imagination, Deeks." Me, I was going to try to forget ever drinking that, although the heaving in my stomach suggested that I had my work cut out for me there. I glanced at Valen. "Are you gonna sit?"

He stayed on his feet, one hand on his weapon. He'd long since graduated from the relaxed wrist-resting-on-the-hilt-of-his-flail stance, moved past the open grip that was his standard pose when he was just _starting_ to get anxious, and was now in full on closed-grip, just-give-me-one-excuse-to-draw-this-thing mode. "No."

I sighed. "Fine. Suit yourself." I fished my claim tickets out of my pocket and put them on the counter to get a good look at them in this light. A good look made doubt creep in. The writing on them was just squiggles. For all I knew, all these tickets said was, "Up yours, human thrall!" _Guess I'll find out._ If all went well, though, I was now the proud owner of six people. _This is so weird_. I'd bought a lot of crazy things in my life, but people? That was a first.

A certain speaking silence tugged at my attention. I turned my head. Valen was standing next to me. He appeared to be stewing, and obviously had something to say. "All right. Spit it out, Valen."

The weapon master looked at me, his face grim. "Very well. Now that it is safer to speak, I would like to know what you intend to do with them."

No need to ask what he meant by 'them'. I looked around. No one was within earshot. I kept my voice low anyway. "Bring them with us, of course."

"Have you considered that, once free of their mindflayer masters, they may attempt to rebel – and that they outnumber us two to one?"

One of these days, I was going to be able to make a decision without him challenging me. Today, however, was obviously not that day. I sighed. "Okay. Three things."

Valen raised his eyebrows "Which are?"

I ticked the items off on my fingers. "One, you could probably kill them all in your sleep. Alone. Two, once we're out of here, we'll have Quarra. And three, once we leave here, we'll tell them the deal."

"And what is this deal?"

"The deal is, they're free." I had no intention of actually owning anybody. Buying them had just been the only way I could think of to get them out of here peacefully. "If they want, they can come with us to Lith My'athar for healing and food and rest, and from there…" I trailed off. I had no idea where to go from there. I rallied. "Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, I doubt they'll try to kill us once they understand they're not slaves anymore." Besides, they were so malnourished and traumatized that unless I treated them worse than the mindflayers had, they'd probably go along with anything, because anything was better than spending every day wondering whether today was the day your brains would get eaten.

Valen didn't give up. "And then what? If you bring them to Lith My'athar, they may very well die with the rest of us. Or be enslaved again."

I tightened my jaw mulishly. "Not if we win."

Valen's voice softened. "Not if we win," he agreed. Then he kept at me, because the man who'd survived Hell wasn't a man who knew how to quit. "But what do you plan to do with them in that case? The drow may be able to find a place for himself in the Underdark, but humans? An elf?"

Pain lanced through my head. "I'll bring them home."

"You? Alone?"

At that, I smiled. "I won't be alone."

Valen looked at my holy symbol and raised an eyebrow. His voice was flat. "I suppose you will say that your god will be with you."

My heart eased a little. "Shaundakul doesn't like cages. So, yeah, he'll be with me."

A scaly hand patted my arm. "So will Deekin." The bard gave me a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, Boss."

Valen didn't touch me, but he did meet my eyes. His own eyes softened. "So shall I," he admitted. "If it comes down to that." He made a face. "You may have faith in your god, but I do not. Better to ensure that you have my sword arm. _That_ , at least, I trust."

I turned to stare at him. _One second he's telling me off, the next, he's volunteering to help me out_. And he called _me_ unpredictable. "I thought you disapproved of me doing this."

Valen shook his head. "Not so," he said softly. He cocked his head. "I think that you have not thought this through. But I cannot fault your compassion." His smile was faint, but reassuring. "I believe that your heart is in the right place."

His words stole mine right out of my throat, and all I could think of to say was, "Oh."

Valen plowed into my silence. "It is just that, sometimes, I wonder where your head is at."

I stared at him, then burst into laughter. "Don't hold back, Valen. Tell me what you really think."

He gave me a mocking little half-bow. "Thank you, I shall."

I shook my head, fighting a smile. "Well, first things first, we need to do what we came for and get out of here in one piece, or else the rest is moot." The golem was still hovering nearby. I eyed him speculatively. He was a golem, but he was also a bartender, and bartenders were always a good source of information. I turned to him. "Hey, uh..." I paused. "Say, do you have a name? I hate to keep calling you 'Hey, you'."

The golem turned his disconsolate stare on me. "My creator did not give me a name."

I was aware of Deekin's scratching quill. "Don't your customers call you something?"

If clinical depression could speak, it would sound like this golem. "I have no customers. Only you."

"All right. Well, I need to call you something. Can I call you Carl?"

The golem seemed to think. "If you wish," it conceded. Its eyes flickered. "New designation: Carl."

Valen was looking at me as if he was wondering where my head was at. Again. "Carl? You have decided to name that thing _Carl_?"

I shrugged and spoke sideways. "He looks like a Carl."

"No. He looks like a golem."

"No, he looks like a golem _named_ Carl."

"That may be the most ridiculous statement I have heard from you yet, and I have heard quite a few of them by now."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

Valen rolled his eyes. "Do as you please. Lady knows I cannot stop you."

I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at him. "I will." I turned back to the golem. "So, Carl. Why aren't there any mindflayers in here? Don't they like your drinks?"

The golem stared at me blankly. "Error," he said. "Insufficient data. What is a mindflayer?"

I stared back. "You say you've been here for seven hundred years?"

"Seven hundred and forty-nine years, seventeen days, three hours, and twenty-one minutes," the golem corrected me.

"Right. And in all that time, have you ever left this building?"

The golem looked at the empty bar, then looked back at me. "No."

I'd passed a lot of time in bars, but seven hundred years were a little much, even for me. "Aren't you bored?"

The golem shrugged his massive adamantine shoulders. "I am a golem. I do not become bored." His pause was long, and gave me the impression that he was waiting for a thought that was coming from a very long way away. "Sometimes…sometimes I count the tiles."

"Does it help?"

"No. Not really."

Just behind my ear, I heard a pompous and slightly metallic 'ahem'. " _If_ I may, I believe that I may be of some assistance at this juncture." There was a soft snort. "More so than this semi-sentient lump of metal, at any rate."

I craned my head around to eye Enserric's hilt. "You're saying you might know why there are no mindflayers in here?"

Enserric glittered, and I could have sworn I felt a smidgeon of smug pleasure, radiating from that little black glass sliver in the back of my head. "Quite." He affected a schoolteacherish tone. "This golem is a magical construct, you see. And magical constructs, like the undead, are either mindless or possessing of minds which are fundamentally unlike those of living beings. Thus, constructs and the undead are immune to the mindflayers' mental powers."

"Oh." That made more sense. "Well, that explains why everybody's sticking close to the golem."

Valen's eyebrow had lifted thoughtfully. "And you are both a magical construct _and_ undead, if I understand your situation correctly," he mused, speaking to a point just over my left shoulder. "Thus making you well-nigh invisible to the illithid."

There was a long pause from Enserric. Then: "My, my, my. Brawn _and_ brains. What an unusual combination." The sword lowered his voice, but not nearly enough. "Perhaps your luck is not so terrible as you thought, my wielder. Assuming you do not ruin it through your own idiocy, of course."

It was a shame Enserric was already dead, because if he hadn't been dead, I would have killed him. "I'm in an illithid city," I said, talking fast. I couldn't give Valen any time to think over the implications of what my blabbermouth sword had just, well, _blabbered_. "I wouldn't call myself lucky, and I'd say we need all brawn and brains we can get." Then I changed the subject. "Speaking of which, who is the brain of this whole operation? Do the illithid have an…overseer? A king? Somebody who tells them what to do?"

Deekin looked up from his notes. "That probably be the Elder Brain," he supplied. "Illithid pods always gots an Elder Brain. It know all the stuff they know, and it talk to other Elder Brains and they tell the other illithid what to do."

I had to work some spit back into my mouth before I could ask the next question. "Okay. Where is it?"

The bard eyed the lizard men at their table. "Dunno, but those guys over there was just complaining about it."

I didn't look. "You understood them?"

"Sure. They be speaking a kind of draconic." The kobold sniffed disapprovingly. "Not the right kind. They be messing it all up. But Deekin understands it, sure."

I should have known. The bard was an information sponge, and he picked words up especially fast. "What were they complaining about?"

"They was just complaining that they not be allowed in the inner ring, 'cause that where the Elder Brain's sanctum be." Deekin's eyes glittered, not in a friendly way. "They be greedy and stupid. They thinks the mindflayers maybe be hiding something, like the good slaves, or treasure."

My skin crawled. "Did they say anything else?"

"Not really. Just more complaining, mostly about the cold and how much they misses their stupid smelly swamp."

I chewed on my lip. "Does the Elder Brain _ever_ have visitors?"

A thoughtful rumble came from behind the bar. It came from the golem, who spoke very slowly, as if working his way through a new and unfamiliar thought. "Yes. There…was one."

I spun on my barstool so fast that I almost whipped around in a full circle, and had to put my hands out to catch myself on the edge of the bar. "Wait? What? Who?"

A voice muttered in my left ear. " _Whom_."

This time, I didn't even bother to look around. "Shut up, Enserric."

Valen cleared his throat. "Does he do that often?"

"Do what?"

"Correct your grammar."

I sighed. "All the damn time."

"Ah? In that case, I admire your endurance."

"How so?"

Valen's voice was dust-dry. "If that were my sword, I would have fallen on it by now."

A grin sprang to my lips, unbidden. "The idea _has_ crossed my mind."

Enserric harrumph'ed. "Very funny, you two."

I patted the sword's pommel condescendingly. "I thought so." I turned my attention back to the golem. "Sorry for the interruption, Carl. Who came to see the Elder Brain?"

The golem answered haltingly, still as if he was trying some unfamiliar thoughts on for size. "Unknown. They…did not offer…their designation. They merely…spoke. Of their intent."

I tried to find my patience. Unfortunately, it seemed to have gone off to wherever my good sense was hiding. "Fine. What did they look like?"

Carl thought about that for a while. "A drow," he said at last. He didn't sound entirely sure about that. "It came with…two? Two other drow." Another long pause. "I remember it…because it killed one of the other drow. That is how I remember." Something like disapproval colored the golem's toneless voice. "I remember because it took me one hour, thirty-two minutes, and eighteen seconds to remove all of the blood from the tiles."

I remembered the lady with the bloody whip, and swallowed hard. "Yeah. That sounds like someone we know, all right." Which meant that the Valsharess had been here, and she'd spoken to the Elder Brain, which meant that it was possible to get in if we made it interesting enough – maybe by offering better terms than the Valsharess could, though I still wasn't sure what those might be. I nodded at the golem. My bartender hadn't been very informative, but then, he wasn't much of a bartender. He was a hell of a sight nicer than anyone else I'd met here so far, though, so I gave him my best smile and said, "Thanks for the information. You've been very helpful."

The golem blinked again and looked down, almost shyly. "You are welcome." He polished the counter awkwardly, then asked, "Will you have another drink?"

My smile didn't budge, although the rest of my face did try to pull away from it. "I've been trying to cut back. Thanks."

Fortunately, the golem was as literal as his cousins, and took me at my word. He nodded. "It has been a pleasure to serve you," he intoned, and trudged away to do the dishes. One dish, anyway.

Valen watched him go, thoughtful. "I wonder…"

He didn't need to explain. I'd had the same thought. The similarities were a little too striking. "You think maybe he's one of the Maker's?"

Valen frowned and nodded. "Yes. A prototype, perhaps. It might explain why this golem is slightly more self-aware than most."

I shrugged. "Ferron said the Maker died about five hundred years ago." Dwarves and duergar could live two, three-hundred years. "If you figure it took the Maker most of his adult life to get these guys built, the timing works." I thought about that and grinned. "Could be fun to introduce him to the others, then. Think we could talk him into coming back with us?"

Valen's expression went into grumpy lockdown. "No."

"Aw, c'mon…"

" _No_."

Deekin's quill had long since stopped moving. Now it drooped from his fingers. "We gots to talk to the Elder Brain, don't we?"

My mood deflated. I forced my voice to stay steady. "No surprise there." The Valsharess had struck her deal high up. We were going to have to do the same. Petitioning Joe Illithid for an alliance would get us about as far as calling a customer service hotline. What we needed to do was to crash the CEO's yacht party and catch him right when he was so high he'd sign anything we stuck in front of him. "We want results, we're going to have go to the top."

"Yeah, but Deekin was kinda hoping there be another way."

"So was I." I touched my circlet. _What if I do have to take this off?_ There were things in my mind I _really_ didn't want these guys to see. Deekin had said that the mindflayers had once had an empire that spanned worlds, and every living soul on those worlds had been slaves to them. As far as I knew, my world had never been one of them. It had always been safe, tucked away in its little corner of the Prime, unnoticed and unaware. Would the Elder Brain see it? Would it care, or would it dismiss my world as too unimportant and too far away from everything to be worthy of its attention? "Deeks?"

"Yeah?"

"Can mindflayers read all of your thoughts?" I swallowed. "Like, even the ones you're not thinking?"

The bard scratched his snout pensively. "Ummm. It depends, Deekin be thinking."

"On what?"

Deekin shrugged. "On how hard they looks."

Valen spoke up. "I have heard that psionics can easily scan your surface thoughts, but it takes them time and focus to delve more deeply."

"How about Elder Brains?"

Valen hesitated. "Elder Brains are looked upon as gods by the illithid. No doubt they can see further than most. How far, I do not know."

I grimaced and lowered my voice to a mutter. "As long as they can't see clear to another world, that's all I'm saying."

Valen looked briefly startled. Then, slowly, he nodded. "Ah. I see your concern." His eyes met mine. They were penetrating. He knew. "We can always leave. The illithid are implacable foes. There is no shame in retreat, if you feel that the risks of this endeavor outweigh the potential rewards."

My mouth twisted. "Yeah, and then what?"

Valen shrugged. "Draw up battle plans that include strategies to counter psionic attacks. It will not be the first time, nor is it necessarily doomed to failure. The races of the Underdark are ever at war with one another, and I have fought alongside enough cerebreliths to know where their weaknesses lie."

I hesitated. Then I shook my head. "I'm not giving up that easy." I'd had enough of failure in my life. "I'm here. I'm going to try to get in there. Then..." I swallowed. I couldn't tell if the roiling in my stomach was fear or just my ill-advised drink mounting a counterattack. "…then we'll see what happens."

Valen went bolt upright. "You?" He'd obviously caught onto my use of the singular instead of the plural. His voice rose. " _Alone_?"

"Yes." If I said it quick, like ripping off a bandage, I could just about say it without losing my nerve. "All it really needs is one person." Quarra would be able to take them home. There was still time before the Valsharess came for us. Nathyrra could reach out to the other settlements. The Seer could find another savior. If nothing else, Valen could drill his forces until they were ready to storm the gates of Hell, if only to get away from him. And _I_ wouldn't have to live with the guilt I'd feel if my hare-brained scheme got Valen and Deekin killed. "There's no reason for you two to risk your skins-"

Valen's eyes had gone wide. "Are you dancing with slaadi?" he burst out. His tail whapped into the rungs of a stool, almost getting entangled in the process. He didn't seem to notice. "What madness is this? There is no way I am leaving you to face an Elder Brain alone!"

I gritted my teeth. "Yes, you are."

"No, I am not."

"Are too."

"Not."

"Too."

Deekin's head whipped back and forth like he was watching a tennis match.

"Not."

"For fuck's sake, Valen, could you not argue with me, just this once?"

The tiefling folded his arms over his chest and glared at me. "No."

I fought back the urge – no, the _need_ – to throw my head back and scream wordlessly at the sky. "Fine." My voice came out as a snarl. I leaned forward. "But you have to promise me that you'll get Deekin out of there, if I can't."

Deekin yelped. "Oh, hey, now, Boss, just wait a minute…"

Valen hesitated. Then he nodded. "Very well. I swear to you that if you fall, I will do my utmost to save him." His face tightened grimly. "But only if you are lost beyond all hope."

Little kobold teeth shone. "Oh, no you guys don't…"

I turned to the bard, pleading in my voice. "Please don't argue with me, Deeks. I promised myself I'd make sure you'd outlive ol' Tiktak. Don't make me break that promise."

The bard's black eyes narrowed to slits. "Deekin make promises too, you know. He promise he watch out for Boss. Or don't Deekin's promises count? Maybe they just be little kobold promises, so not important like big human promises, huh?"

I stared at him like he was a lap poodle who'd suddenly morphed into a hellhound. "It's not that…"

"Oh, it _so_ is." The bard grabbed his book and quill and bag and hopped down, his little face set in determination. "Nope. Not this time, Boss. You not leaving Deekin behind again. Deekin coming with you. Whether you likes it or not."

I looked back and forth between the tiefling and the kobold. They both looked back, resolute and immovable as a pair of concrete pylons, and I didn't know whether to scream or cry or hug them or pour the golem's horrible drink on both their heads.

Eventually, and at a loss for anything else to say in response to this breathtaking display of barminess on both their parts, I settled on just one word - but I said it with feeling. " _Shit_."

* * *

The central dome of the city hovered over the inner ring like a blimp, and as I came closer, I saw that it wasn't even a dome at all. It was a sphere, but not a perfect one, more lumpy, and it was made of some gray substance with a pinkish sheen to it and veins of red running all through it. It looked, I thought, like an enormous brain. My skin crawled. I looked away.

There was a circular platform beneath the sphere, and another mindflayer hovering in the center of it. This one was different. It was taller, for starters, and its skin wasn't purplish-gray, but a purple so dark it was almost black. Its tentacles were longer, two, with the two longest reaching almost the entire length of its body. Those tentacles lifted as we approached, kind of like a hungry diner might lift his fork and knife as the waiter arrived with his food.

Deekin jabbed my leg. "That be an ulitharid," he squeaked. "Be very, very careful, Boss. They be seriously bad news."

 _No fucking shit_? That thing had more bad news written all over it than the front page of the Times. My steps slowed, in spite of my best efforts. _I really do not want to go over there._

Valen drew close enough to whisper in my ear. His voice was soft as silk, and I could feel his breath tickle the back of my neck. "Do not be afraid. I am right behind you."

My skin tingled, and my thoughts veered wildly to places they really shouldn't have gone. _Whoa. Bad timing, Rebecca. Cut it out._ On the bright side, now the pounding of my heart wasn't entirely from terror. Was that an improvement? I couldn't even tell anymore. The Underdark had warped my perspective until right was left, up was down, and everything I took for fixed and certain was flying off into the firmament like pop rockets.

Gritting my teeth – if I had any molars left by the time this was over, it'd be a miracle - I moved forward. _Can't stop. Gotta keep moving. Come on. Don't chicken out, you dumb bitch. People are counting on you._

The ulitharid watched me approach. Before I could set foot on the platform, it held up a hand. Its fingers were long, webbed, and tipped with hooked black nails. _That is far enough, thrall._ Its voice rang in my head, imperious and cold. _This is the entrance to the Elder Concord, the sanctum of the Elder Brain. You are not allowed here. Return to the outer ring with others of the thrall races._

I had to work some spit back into my mouth before I could speak. "I'm here to talk with the Elder Brain." I found a smile somewhere. "I've got an offer I think it might like to hear."

The ulitharid looked at me the way a scientist might look at a bacteria under a microscope – vaguely interested, but wondering if I might not be more interesting if it put me in a tube of something caustic. _None of the thrall race can speak with the Elder Brain. Tell me your business, and I can relay your message for you._

There was really no point to concealing it. "I'm here to talk about the Valsharess."

The ulitharid made no sign of acknowledgment, but went still for a long moment. Then it gave a twitch, almost of surprise, and for the first time it actually looked at me. _How interesting. The Elder Brain says you are to be given access to the Elder Concord._ The mindflayer's hand turned with a slow, awful grace until one wicked finger was pointing to the crown on my head. _But you cannot enter while you wear the item that shields your thoughts._

I stared back, trying to read that damn squid face. _Just like that? Take your hat off and step right into my office?_ That was too easy. What the hell was going on? Were they just planning to lure me in and eat me, or was the Elder Brain really that interested in a chit-chat about a certain would-be queen?

Blood pounded in my ears. This wasn't the rush of adrenaline, but the clammy, shrinking flush of fear. This was madness. _No. Not madness._ The Valsharess had been here. She'd faced this. She'd come out alive. If I couldn't do the same, then what was I even doing here? _No._ If I was going down, I wanted to go down with a scream, not a whimper.

Besides, I had something the Valsharess didn't have.

I reached out and in, towards the sliver of ice lodged in my brain stem. _Enserric._ Even inside my own head, I sounded nervous. _Are you awake?_

The sword's response was immediate. _Wide awake and soiling myself in terror. Metaphorically speaking, of course._

 _What do you have to be afraid of? They can't see into your mind, can they?_

 _Mine, no. But, given our connection, I do not know what it will do to me if your brains get devoured, wielder – and I have no desire to find out._

 _Fine. Just stay sharp._

Enserric's voice was smug. _Naturally._

Valen's voice was so much nicer to listen to it really wasn't fair. "Are you certain you wish to do this?"

Certainty was for the birds. All I had was a hope and a prayer. "Y-yeah." I wasn't sure, I was never sure, but if I was sure of anything, it was that it was better to risk everything on a bad hand than to fold and lose and wonder whether I might have eked out a win after all. "You?"

Valen had all the certainty I didn't. "Yes."

At least one of us was certain. "All right, then," I said, and reached up and removed my crown.

The ulitharid saw and nodded and stepped aside, beckoning with a spidery hand. _You may enter._

I stared at the platform. Then I nodded and stepped up.

The world shifted.

* * *

There was something in my head.

The memories and knowledge of a thousand minds flooded mine. If I'd had any sense of having a body, I thought my body might have been driven to its knees.

Babble tore through my head. Images bombarded it, shifted, then wavered into focus.

I saw a gray-pink thing in a vat. It was pulsing. Men and women of every race surrounded it, kneeling, caressing it with slavish care.

Then a voice spoke, and a million voices echoed behind it, as if they were all speaking at once across some endless void. _You have been given access to the inner sanctum - a rare privilege for a thrall._

I had a body. I knew I did. I tried to focus on it, felt skin and flesh and blood and pulse. There were other bodies by me, one small and one large. _Deekin. Valen_. A voice rasped from a throat I wasn't entirely sure was mine. "Who are you?"

A million voices answered as one. _We are the overmind._

It was enormous. It was drowning me. This had been a very big mistake. "What do you want?"

All the voices were amused. _To speak. Was that not what you wanted?_

I didn't know what I'd wanted, but it sure as hell wasn't this. "Yes. No." There was a hand on my shoulder. Reflexively, I lifted to cover it with my own. It was warm, scar-roughened, and real. I focused on it like a dying woman on her regrets. "Yes. I wanted to talk. About the Valsharess."

 _We know. We can see your thoughts, thrall. We see you are an enemy of the Valsharess, and you know the illithid are her allies. You wish to renegotiate her terms._

I was outmatched. I could only answer honestly. "Yes."

 _Then we may speak. We must make you aware, however, that Zorvak'Mur is only a small part of a larger whole. Throughout the Underdark, the Overminds of many illithid pods have pledged allegiance to the Valsharess. We Overminds now act as one Elder Concorde. Only a consensus of all the Overminds linked through the Elder Concorde can end our alliance with the Valsharess._

There was no need to consider its words. They were seared straight into my understanding, not even bothering with the slow, dull passage from my ears through my nerves to my brain. "So what do I have to do to convince them?"

 _You?_ A million voices laughed. _You? Nothing. A thrall could never convince the Elder Concorde of anything...but_ _ **we**_ _of the Zorvak'Mur Overmind could sway the Concorde to abandon the Valsharess._

I was a speck in a vast and indifferent universe. I stood and asked the questions I had to, because I had to, because it was my place as a speck to ask the questions and hear the answers. "How?"

The explanation arrived in an instant. _The illithid detest the drow; they are fit only to serve as thralls. Yet we have been forced to follow the Valsharess and her army of dark elves despite our hatred of them. We illithid only follow the Valsharess because many of our pods are not strong enough to stand against her. If you gave us the power to oppose her, we could withdraw our support._

I asked again. "How?"

 _We once captured a thrall from a strange village here in the Underdark._ An image flashed in my mind – an elf, fine-boned and white-winged. I was standing over him, looking down. His face was disorted strangely, his eyes rolled up until the whites were all that were showing. Blood rimmed his lashes and spilled down his cheeks like tears. _From the thrall's mind we learned of a powerful artifact - a magic mirror that the winged elves used to spy on their enemies. Such an artifact would give us the power to stand against the Valsharess._

Even washed in the waves of that voice, I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing. "You want me…to give you…the mirror?"

The nightmare chorus sounded almost reasonable. _You must look at this logically. Your enemy is the Valsharess. By making us stronger, we can oppose her will. This will make her weaker._

Fingers tightened on the shoulder I was barely aware that I had. A voice rasped. "And once…you have that power…you will use it…to destroy this world. No. No deal, mind-hacker."

I held onto that voice like a lifeline. It was attached to the hand on my shoulder. I held onto that, too. "No deal," I agreed. Thoughts trickled through the voice – my own thoughts, seeping through the cracks the voice had opened in me. I thought of the dead woman with laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. "You're even worse than her." At least the Valsharess only killed people. She didn't destroy their minds. There wasn't much left of me, but what was left of me, the core that still stood after that voice blasted everything else away, stood firm. "I won't help you."

The voice caught me, held me. _Yes. You will._

I tried to move and found that I couldn't. Distant rage flickered. "Let me go."

The voice ignored my demand. Instead, it stretched its tentacles towards my heart, where Shaundakul's gift shone like a tiny sun. _You have power, thrall – power enough to span the Planes._ There was a sensation of speed, of wind, of doors spinning open from nothing and vast distances being traversed in an instant. _Such power is wasted on a thrall. You barely understand it. We do. We will put it to better use._ It took on a wheedling tone. _Give yourself to us. It will not hurt, we promise._

Something howled in my ears. It sounded like the wind. "No." That gift wasn't mine to give, nor theirs to take.

Something reached out towards my mind. The voice – the voices – rose like a tidal wave. _Yes._

The waves rose.

I went under.


	47. Thought and Memory

_A/N: I felt bad for leaving you with such a cliffhanger, so here's some ahead-of-schedule consolation._

* * *

 _You lock the door  
_ _And throw away the key  
_ _There's someone in my head  
_ _But it's not me._

\- Pink Floyd, "Brain Damage"

~*~  
Chapter 47: Thought and Memory  
~*~

I opened my eyes and saw a ceiling.

It was plaster – good stuff, with the deep sheen of limestone. Crown moulding bounded it, hand-carved and hand-painted and ornate, in the understated and slightly shabby way of old money that no longer had anything to prove.

The door opened. I turned my head, my cheek pressing into fine linen. The linen smelled familiar. It smelled like home.

A woman walked in. She was a tall woman with olive skin, curly brown hair, and a teasing smile. Her eyes lit on me, and her smile broadened. "There you are, sweetie."

I stared. My vision blurred. "Mom?"

"Ssh. I'm here." My mother sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed my hair back from my forehead. "I heard you tossing and turning in here. Were you having a bad dream?"

My eyes traced every line of her face, as familiar to me as my own dreams. I was crying. Why was I crying? "I missed you."

"Missed me?" Mom laughed. She had a laugh like fine champagne, rich and bubbly, and when I heard it I knew that I had always loved it, just as I knew that I had forgotten how it sounded until just now. "But I've been right here all this time."

 _Here?_ Where was 'here'? I sat up slowly and took in my surroundings. The floors were parquet, the curtains were silk, the walls had the subtly rich sheen of oil paint, and none of the furniture was less than a century old. There was a hand-blown chandelier hanging from the ceiling and a silver tray on the bedstand. The tray was filled with miscellaneous junk, in the way of bedside trays everywhere. I knew this place, but... "How did I get here?"

"You live here, sweetie." My mother looked at me more closely. She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead. "Are you feeling all right?" She frowned. "Maybe I should call the doctor."

I looked around, all of the old familiar sights at once comforting and unsettling. "No. Don't. I'm okay." Was I? I didn't know. I couldn't seem to get my mind straight, and there was a buzzing in my ears. If I listened hard, I thought it almost sounded like words, but they were distant and muffled and I couldn't make them out.

Mom frowned, patently concerned. "Are you sure?" She tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, or tried to. It sprang loose almost immediately. "Have you been having nightmares again? Don't worry. I'm here now. I'll make it better."

I shook my head. "It wasn't a nightmare." There really were monsters under the bed. I knew there were. I just wished I could remember what they looked like. "It was real."

Mom smiled. "Well, whatever it was, it's over now. You're safe." She tried to pull the blankets up over my shoulders. "Just stay here with me."

The buzzing in my ears increased, and a thought surfaced from the depths of my mind. _She is dead. This is not real. Tell her 'no'._ I pushed my mother's hands away. "No. This is wrong." I tried to get up. "I need…" What did I need? "I need to get out of here."

Mom's face changed. Her smile went fixed, like a rictus, and her eyes went black. "No, child. You need to stay. You're sick."

This wasn't my mother. It was a thing wearing my mother's face. I shrank back. "But I'm not…"

"Enough." Mom, or the thing that looked like her, pressed me back into the bed, pulled the blankets up around my shoulders, and kissed me on the forehead so hard it made my head hurt. "Sleep. Rest. Don't move from there. I'll go call the doctor." She left, pulling the door closed behind her.

I'd never been good at doing what I was told, and something in me knew, somehow, that now wasn't the time to develop a sudden talent for it. I waited for all of thirty seconds after the door clicked shut. Then I threw the blankets back and scrambled out of bed and took stock.

This house was known to me. _This is the townhouse._ Another thought surfaced – a memory of city lights streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, and rooms that were all pale wood and polished metal and glass. _I moved out of here when I went to college. Didn't I?_

I looked around, then froze. The room had changed. The chandelier had been replaced by a pendant light, the silver tray had moved, and there were different blankets on the bed. When had that happened?

Confused, I turned – just in time to see a ghost image of myself stroll across the room and walk right through me.

I saw an incomprehensible jumble of hair and eyeballs and teeth and sinuses. A sensation like being poked with a million icy needles ran through me. Every hair I had on me stood on end. I tried to say something, but all that came out was, "Yaaargh."

Another ghost image of me – a teenage one, hunched over the writing desk in the posture of someone who was being forced, practically at gunpoint, to stay indoors and study when she would really rather be outside doing anything else – turned, frowning, as if she'd heard something. Then she shook her head, threw her pen down, shoved her chair back, and crossed to the window, fading away between one step and the next.

I thought about backing up, but the room was full of me and I didn't want to walk through myself again, so I stayed where I was and stared.

There were more ghost images now, all going about their business. I saw a toddler version of me, bashing blocks together on the floor. I saw a little girl version, hanging half-out of the window with her toys forgotten on the floor behind her. I saw a child, laughing, a child, crying with a stuffed animal clutched to her chest, a half-grown woman pacing, a young woman lying on the bed with her forearm over her eyes, a teenager dancing by herself with clumsy abandon to music I couldn't hear.

I couldn't stop watching them, all the different versions of me. _Had I really looked like that?_ When I was a teenager I thought I'd looked gawky and frizzy-haired, but the dancing girl was beautiful. She spun past, and I half-reached out. My fingertips brushed her as she passed, but she didn't seem to notice, and spun on, heedless and happy. By the next turn, she was a wisp, and by the next, she was gone.

Slowly, I lowered my hand and watched the many versions of me form and fade. _So, which version am I, anyway?_ Prompted by that thought, I looked down at myself. I was wearing a nightgown. Since when did I wear nightgowns to bed – or anything, for that matter? I plucked at the pretty little violets on their frilly white cotton backing. _What the shitting fuck am I wearing?_

A noise almost made me jump straight out of my hideous frilly getup. It was a shocking noise, loud and harsh. It sounded like pebbles hitting glass.

My head swiveled. I listened. There was silence for maybe a minute. Then the noise came again. A shower of mixed dirt and gravel pattered against the window. One particularly large chunk of gravel _pock_ 'ed against the glass so hard it left a chip.

My forehead creased. I crossed to the window and shoved the sash up and leaned out. " _What_?" I snapped.

A red-haired boy looked up at me. He was standing in the alley outside my bedroom window. It was hard to read his expression from three stories away, but I thought he looked relieved. "There you are. I have been looking for you."

This seemed a ridiculous statement, somehow – and yet also, somehow, perfectly reasonable. "Yeah? So what took you so long?"

"The lady at the front door would not let me in." The red-haired boy frowned and folded his arms over his chest, conveying sulky indignation so strongly that I could feel it from a good forty feet away. "She called me a hooligan."

I looked at the boy curiously. He _did_ look kind of ragged and dirty and poor. " _Are_ you a hooligan?"

I could almost _hear_ his eyes roll. "Yes. But I do not see how that figures into anything." He looked up appraisingly, evidently admiring the house's fancy brickwork and marble trim. "Nice case. You want to let me into that gilded birdcage of yours, or should I go catch a skeg at that other cutter's kip? I can probably get in there easier. They've left the door unlatched."

I blinked down at him. "The fuck you just say?"

The red-haired boy snorted. "I am speaking plain language. If you don't tumble to it, that's your own sodding fault."

Maybe he would make more sense from close up. I didn't hold out much hope, but hey, it was worth a try. "Fine. Give me a minute." I squirmed out of the window and slid onto the fire escape. My dumbass nightgown bunched around my thighs. I tugged it straight. Outside, the fire escape ladder was latched to the metal frame. I unlatched and lowered it, then climbed back into the window, since there wasn't room enough on the fire escape for two. I kept my head out, though, so I could shout down, "Come on up, if you're coming up!" The boy looked around the alleyway as if checking for cops, then clambered up the fire escape with a springy strength that belied his scrawny frame. I stepped back to let him in, although once he was in I wasn't so sure he was a boy. As if in a dream, his image kept shifting – now a skinny boy who was all knees and elbows, now a man who was all muscle and scars. "How'd you get here?" I asked.

The boy/man looked around, frowning at all the wealth on display. He lingered close by the window, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, like he was afraid to touch anything. "I knew I needed to find you." He watched one of my ghosts pass by and fade, and his frown deepened into perplexity. "I do not know why."

I knew how he felt. More than that, I knew _him_ , although I didn't know how I knew. I just knew that I felt better now that he was here. "Neither do I, but thanks for finding me."

The red-haired boy nodded in acknowledgment of my thanks and sidled a few steps further into my bedroom. He was malnourished and wary, like a feral cat. "Where are we? Before, we were…" A worried line appeared in his forehead. "Somewhere else. Not here." He rubbed his forehead, as if trying to smooth the worry from it, but it didn't work. His voice took on an edge of frustration. "Why can I not remember?"

I remembered a multitude of voices. My breath left me, all at once. I tried to get it back. "I don't know, but you're right. We weren't here before." I struggled to remember. "How did we get here?"

The boy hesitated. Then he shook his head. "I have no idea." He ran a hand through his hair. "My head feels…strange. Thoughts keep slipping through it, but I cannot seem to hold them."

I shivered. "Same here."

Footsteps came to the door. There were voices in the hallway. One of them belonged to my mother, or at least to the thing that had stolen her skin.

The boy met my eyes. His were blue – a bright and breathtaking blue, like a late summer sky. They were anxious but determined. "We need to leave. Now."

I didn't know how, I didn't know why, but I knew he was right. If those voices came in here and caught us together, bad things would happen. I cast around. My eyes fell on the closet door. I grabbed his hand and started for the closet, pulling him after me. "Too late to run. Hide in here."

Clothes rattled on their hangers. The closet door creaked shut behind us. Everything went pitch black and quiet.

The footsteps paused outside the bedroom door. The knob rattled, turned. Voices spoke. There were a lot of them, way more than there should have been, like a vast chorus was shouting in my head, and they _hurt._

I raised my hands to my ears. An arm slipped around my shoulders, and a voice – one voice, just one, rough as gravel and smooth as silk – whispered in my ear. "Sshh. Do not be afraid. It will not hurt you." His voice was soft and fervent and grim. "I will not allow it."

He seemed awfully sure of himself, but he couldn't hear the voices. Not like I could. _We shouldn't be here._ We had to get out, or that thing that was wearing my mother's skin would find us, and while I appreciated my companion's willingness to try to protect me, I was pretty sure he'd fail if he tried. This was my house, not his. _I_ had to get us out of here. It didn't even matter where I took us, as long as it wasn't here.

The voices buzzed. An iron band tightened around my head, first to the point of pain and then to a point just past that. I clutched my head and bent every thought towards repeating the same words, over and over, like a prayer. _I'm not here. I'm not here. I'm not here. I'm not here._ Somebody whimpered. I thought it was me. _Please, somebody get me out of here._

As if in response, the buzzing in my head rose, muting the voices. Then the light coming in through the cracks in the door flickered and changed in both tone and quality. As soon as it did, the iron band eased.

I took my hands away from my head. The voices were gone. I started to breathe again. "Shit."

Next to me, the boy shivered. "Hellfire."

I swallowed and tried to see. All I saw were two red lights. I cringed, then blinked and relaxed. "Is that you, doing that?"

The red lights went off, then on again. "Is what me?"

I thought, then decided not to make an issue of it. At least it wasn't quite so dark in here, anyway. Not with his eyes glowing like that. "Never mind." I looked around. Light was coming in through the slats on the doors. Those slats hadn't been there before. In the faint light, I saw that the boy had horns on his head. I hadn't seen those before, either. I mostly just noticed now because he had something dangling off of one. I pointed. "Um. You've got…"

The boy/man squinted at me. The dull red glow of his eyes dimmed slightly. "What?"

I pointed to my own head. "On your…" I cleared my throat. "On your horn. You've got something..."

"What?" He reached up and removed the thing and looked at it. There were lots of complicated leather straps and silky bits and other, more mysterious wobbly bits that looked like they might be rubber. Even in the dark, I was sure he was blushing. "Oh."

I stared. "What's _that_ for?" I asked, but some part of me already knew. I started giggling, not so much out of humor as out of nerves.

The boy dropped the thing like it was a live snake and glowered at me. "Stop _laughing_."

He was right. I was making too much noise. Something might hear me. I clapped a hand over my mouth. Outside, somebody squealed, then somebody else laughed raucously. I cocked my head, listening with rising intrigue and a little trepidation. I took my hand away from my mouth and whispered, "Where are we?"

The boy hesitated. "Um."

That wasn't all that informative. "Um, what?"

"I think…" The boy opened the door a crack and peeked out. His tail lashed once and went still, and I knew without knowing how that in the peculiar body language of people with tails, or at least in the body language of this _particular_ peculiar person, that motion meant that he was surprised, bordering on shocked. "I think…we might be home."

I watched him. He didn't sound very excited to be home. "Where's home?"

The boy frowned. Without answering, he pushed the door open and slipped out of the closet. He obviously wasn't feeling communicative. I shrugged and followed him, figuring that he'd explain things eventually and in the meantime I didn't want to get too far away from him. He was the only thing here that felt right to me. Everything else felt deeply wrong.

We stepped into a bedroom. This time, it wasn't mine.

I snuck as quiet a peek as I could. I'd learned early on that not all of my friends had homes like mine, and they were pretty sensitive about that, so I'd developed a knack for gawking without visibly gawking. My home had reeked of money, but his just plain stunk, although it did have a _veneer_ of money. There was gilt everywhere, but it was peeling, showing splintered wood underneath. Moth-eaten velvet curtains and soft carpets hid a multitude of sins, which was good, because this was clearly a place with a multitude of sins to hide. There were bars on the windows, and the air smelled like stale sex, stale sweat, and stale smoke.

His home was nothing like my home, except for one thing – it, too, was filled with ghosts. Many of them looked like the red-haired boy, but there were others, men and women, flickering and moving and fading in and out like candle flames.

One ghost was more constant than the others, remaining fixed even while all the others changed. There was a bed in the center of the room, and a woman on the bed. She had creamy skin and crimson hair. One moment she sat on the edge of the bed in a slip, smoking a rollup and staring into the distance with the tense stillness of a deer who'd sighted a wolf. The next, she was up and pacing. The next, she was brushing her long red hair and humming a merry tune that clashed with the grim set of her face. The next, she reclined against the pillows, staring at the ceiling with the white sheets tangled around her. She wasn't wearing much in the way of clothes, and she wasn't moving, either. If not for the rise and fall of her chest, I might have taken her for dead.

The boy stopped and stared at the woman. His face was painful to see. "You…you are dead." His throat worked as he swallowed. "You should not be here." He looked away from her, his eyes searching every corner with the same mix of confusion and recognition I'd been feeling not five minutes prior. " _I_ should not be here."

I studied the woman's face. It was a beautiful face, with sculpted lips, a stubborn chin, a straight nose, and cheekbones that could have won prizes. There was something familiar about it. I looked at the boy, and saw the echo of her face in his. "She's your mother, isn't she?"

He half-glanced back at me. "Yes."

Our voices finally seemed to get through to the woman. Her head turned. She frowned, then sat up hurriedly, gathering the sheets around herself. "Valen. What are you doing here? I thought I told you to leave." She ran a hand through her long, disheveled red hair. "You should not be here."

I looked at the boy. _Valen_. That was his name. A rush of pleasure suffused me. It felt good to remember his name. I'd have to make sure I didn't forget it again.

Valen didn't seem nearly as pleased. He stared at the woman with an expression of longing and pain and confusion. "I did leave. I do not know why I came back."

Valen's mother frowned at him, then shook her head and spoke to someone else, her voice both sharp and dull. "Relka. Take him. There is no time…" A knock on the door cut off her words. Her face turned grim, and determination laced her voice. "Go, Relka. Get him out of here, before someone sees and she decides to put _him_ up for sale."

At first, I didn't know who Valen's mother was talking to. Then I saw the other woman, and this one, too, was slightly more solid than the rest. She sat on a sofa by the window, where she'd been staring out through the bars, a book open on her lap but forgotten. She was a surpassingly tiny and delicate woman, white-haired but young-looking, with mottled blue spots all over her skin and webs between her fingers. Now, she put her book aside and stood, holding her hands out. "Valen, little love." Her voice was low and almost sonorous. It was a lot of voice to come out of such a small woman, like whalesong from a minnow. "Come. Keep me company. I have a new song for you. I think you will like it."

Valen shied liked a spooked horse. "Relka?

The woman smiled at him archly, and now we were somewhere else – a near-identical room, but the red-haired woman was gone, the bed rumpled but empty, and Relka was sitting again by a different window. "That is my name," she said lightly. "Careful that you do not wear it out, or else you shall have to find me another one." She reached up and wrapped her fingers around Valen's and drew him down to sit next to her. "Here," she said, and flipped through her book before holding it out to him. "Why don't you read to me, little love?"

Valen stared at her, shook his head and sprang back to his feet. "This…is not right." His eyes looked a little wild. "This is a memory." He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. "This is not real."

Relka kept smiling. "Of course it is real. What else would it be?"

This felt familiar. I remembered the thing with my mother's face and stared at Relka, narrow-eyed. "It's not her, Valen. I don't know what it is, but it's not her."

The red-haired man looked at me, then back at her. His face was grim, and somehow, he'd gotten more _definite_ , as if instead of hovering between two states, boy and man, he'd finally settled on one. He'd lost his gawkiness and gained a whole lot of muscle, and his face was older and wearier, but his baby blues hadn't changed a bit. "I know. There is something about her that feels…wrong."

Relka put aside her book and stood. "You are speaking nonsense, Valen." Her eyes flicked to me. They had gone black. "Don't listen to her. Of course I am real." She reached out to him. "I taught you. Took care of you. Protected you. How can you doubt me?"

Valen backed away. "No." He swallowed and stared at her face. "Relka did all of those things, but you are not she."

Slowly, Relka closed her book, put it aside, and stood. The tiny woman's face was changing. Things were writhing under her skin. "This is illogical. Why do you resist? We have offered you a dream – a painless return to a happier past. Why will you not take what is offered?" Her eyes darkened to black, and her voice took on strange echoes. "We do not know how you have been able to resist us so far, but no matter. If your minds will not bend, they will be broken." Then she advanced.

Something told me that letting her get to us was a really bad idea. I looked around frantically. All the doors had vanished. I closed my eyes and thought, _I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not here,_ but when I opened them again, nothing had changed. Whatever I had done last time, it wasn't working here. "Valen," I half-yelled and half-hissed. "Think of a way out."

He had gone even paler than usual. "A way out?"

There was no time to explain. "Any way. Doesn't matter. Just tell yourself you're not here, as hard as you can." He didn't answer. I hoped that meant he was following my advice. Our backs hit the wall. "Any time now, Valen!"

Relka reached out, her face changing, _melting_ into something purple-skinned and slimy…

And then she wasn't there anymore, and neither were we.

I gulped for breath. "Shit, that was close." Then I got a good look at our surroundings. "Oh, no…"

The room was pleasant, small but airy. The walls were paneled and painted, sage and bone and gilt. I was facing the window. It had lace curtains, and looked out onto a rose garden.

I stared at the roses. I didn't look behind me. Behind me, somebody was playing the piano. _Chopin_ , I thought, and I didn't want to turn around, but I did anyway. I couldn't help myself. Something deeper than thought had a hold of me.

My mother smiled at me. Her hands moved over the keys – long, thin hands, like mine, except that hers could actually carry a tune. "Hello, sweetie."

I backed away. There was a ghost of me, sitting next to my mother on the piano bench. She was smiling, oblivious, happy in the way of somebody who had no idea what was coming. "No." I wished I didn't sound so much like I was begging. "You're not her. This isn't real."

My mother laughed her champagne laugh. "That is where you are mistaken, thrall." Her image faded, as did the image of my child self, but my mother's voice stayed, echoing all around me. "Thought is the only true reality." Outside, the sky darkened. "Here. Let me show you."

When I looked again, the room had changed, and so had I. I was sitting on the bottom step of a long staircase, my hand wrapped around the final baluster as I watched people mill around the foyer. Some of them went through the doors at the far end, but the doors always shut behind them so I couldn't see what was happening. I could hear just fine, though. I could hear my father crying.

I flinched with my whole body and scrambled upright. I left an afterimage behind – a girl, barely six, huddled exactly where I'd been sitting. She was all hair and knees and misery. " _No_." It was all I could say.

A hand touched my shoulder, and a voice wrapped around me like a silken blanket. "What is it?"

 _Valen._ He was still there. I didn't look at him, though. I couldn't take my eyes off of that door. "N-nothing." Everything. "Just a memory." Only it seemed so real and so _now_ , and now I knew that my mother was dying behind that door, and soon, once the crying had died down a little, the door would open, and my grandmother would come out, and she'd take my hand and tell me I had to be a big girl now and big girls didn't cry…

The door opened. The girl on the stairs looked up. I couldn't bear to see the hope on her face. It was like staring into the sun. I yanked my hand from the baluster as if it had burned me. "I…I need to…" I needed to get out of there. I stumbled through the nearest door. I didn't even care where it led, as long as it led away.

Behind the door was another room, this time with no crying, though there were still ghosts, winking in and out of view like fireflies. As they didn't seem immediately threatening, I chose to ignore them in favor of looking for somewhere to sit before I fainted. There was a sofa. It looked solid enough. I sank down on it. I was shaking.

A soft step came near me. "Are you all right?" Valen asked, the way people did when they knew the answer was, 'No.' but felt like they had to ask anyway.

I could feel him hovering nearby. If I reached out, I could touch him. I balled my fists in my lap and hunched over, letting my hair fall forward to hide my face, though it wasn't quite long enough. _Big girls don't cry._ "Just…give me a minute," I said, without looking up.

He hesitated, then stepped away. "Very well."

My nails dug into my palms. How had it hit me so _hard_? It had been years. I thought I'd been okay. I _had_ been okay. Time had blunted grief's claws, so that they just jabbed me once in a while instead of ripping. But this? This felt real and immediate and suddenly the pain was as fresh as the daisies my parents had been pushing up all this time.

I remembered a voice like a billion voices, all talking at once. _If your minds will not bend, they will be broken._ Maybe making me relive mom's death was meant to break me. But why, and who was doing the breaking? I couldn't remember. I wished I could remember.

Somewhere, a clock ticked. I tried to collect myself. Eventually, the urge to sob like a baby receded, and I finally dared to push my hair away from my face and look up.

 _Fuck,_ I thought, after a few seconds of pure, blind bewilderment. _Toto, I think we're back in Kansas._

We were in a long room that a realtor would have described as 'gracious'. The floors were wide planks of heart pine and the walls were whitewashed, impeccably plain. I was seated on a tufted Chesterfield sofa. There was a low table in front of me, piled with books and magazines. At the opposite end of the room, there was a long dining table. The table was set for twelve, with heavy silver cutlery, a pristine white tablecloth, and two big crystal vases full of freshly cut hydrangeas, one on each end. The table was flanked by a big marble fireplace on one side and a pair of French doors on the other. The doors led out onto a flagstone terrace that overlooked formal gardens and a rolling lawn dotted with big old shade trees. Paintings adorned on the walls. Silk carpets adorned the floor, one under the table and another beneath my feet.

It all looked very familiar. All except the handsome redhead standing by the sideboard, anyway. He'd definitely never been here before. I would have remembered that.

Valen was looking at me, his face as serious as it could get, which was pretty damn serious. "That woman," he said. "The one at the piano. She was your mother." It wasn't a question.

I looked at him. I couldn't remember what he'd been wearing before we got here, but now he was back in his armor and looking more like the Valen I knew. "How could you tell?"

The tiefling hesitated. "You have her look," he answered. He hesitated again. "And her laugh."

That was where he was wrong. Nobody had my mother's laugh. Her laugh could make the whole world laugh with her. Mine was just an echo of the real thing. I shook my head and looked down. "I don't know. I don't remember much. She died when I was six."

"So that _was_ a memory." Valen's eyes scanned the room. His face wavered between wariness, confusion, and interest. "Is this a memory, too, or is it real?"

"I don't know." Things kept shifting. The table settings weren't the same from one moment to the next, the pile of magazines in front of me grew and shrank, the hydrangeas become orchids became hydrangeas again. "It feels almost like a dream, but like a real dream, if that makes any sense." I looked at Valen. He was the only thing in the room that _didn't_ change every time I looked at him. "Are _you_ real?"

Valen frowned and shrugged. "I think so. Are you?"

I poked at myself. I was back in my usual clothes and armor, thank Shaundakul. I wasn't sure when that had happened or how, but right then I wasn't going to question it. "I think I'm real. But how would I know?"

"I do not know, but if anyone here is real, it is you. I cannot be the one remembering this place. I have never been here before." Valen's gaze was searching. "But you have." It wasn't a question.

I couldn't deny it. "I used to live here."

Curiosity lit his blue eyes. "Truly?" He looked down, then skirted the dining table, giving both table and rug a very wide berth. It was like he thought the furniture might bite, or possibly explode. He stopped by the French doors, looking out over the grounds. His tail swayed gently as he drank in the view. "I cannot tell. Is this your world, or the Seer's?"

I blinked a few times, but no matter how many times I blinked, he was still there, standing in the dining room of my old house, surrounded by the fragments of my former life. Whether or not this was real, it was definitely _surreal_. "Uh." I found my voice. "Yes. It's…my world." Against my better judgment, I rose and moved to join him at the door. I didn't know what was happening, but I was pretty sure we were in danger. We needed to figure out what was going on, not sightsee. But I hadn't seen this view in a long time, and now that I was seeing it, a kind of wistful nostalgia had seized me. I pointed to a blooming parterre. "That was my mother's rose garden." I smiled sadly. "Mom did love her roses." My finger lifted, pointing to the distant sparkle of water just visible past the last line of trees. "And that's the Hudson. The city's about thirty miles downriver."

Valen frowned. "I thought you said you lived in the city."

"I did. This was our country house. We came here during the summer."

Valen's head reared back slightly in surprise. "You had more than one house?"

I decided not to tell him about the beach house. Or the cabin in the mountains. Or the pied-à-terre in Paris. Or the row house in London. Or… "Yeah. I had more than one house."

Valen frowned and turned to look around the room once more. His eyes lingered on the polished silver candlesticks on the mantle, and the crystal chandelier over the dining table, and the paintings, and the silk carpets, and all of the little tells that spoke of wealth. Flushing, he touched one of his horns and ran a hand through his hair. "I did not even have one house," he muttered, half to himself. "Most of the time I have counted myself lucky to find a dry place to kip. And you? You are a sodding _landowner_."

The poor man looked so miserable that I just had to say something comforting. "Not anymore." I gestured at our surroundings. "I lost all of this when I left. Now, I spend my nights getting rained on, more often than not."

Valen relaxed, a little, but his posture was still that of a man who felt spectacularly ill-at-ease. He looked out at the green fields and blue skies. "Your world does not seem so different from the Seer's."

I snorted. "Wait until you see the rest of it before you say that." I noticed how stiffly he stood, and how carefully he avoided going near any of the carpets. "You _can_ step on the carpet, you know," I added. "It won't bite."

Valen looked down at the carpet, scowled, and looked back up. "I am afraid that I might track something onto it."

"What, like mud?"

"No." His voice was positively morose. "Like poverty."

This was too weird and too disturbing and I kind of still wanted to cry and now, to top it all off, he was having another one of his weird fits of class consciousness? I snapped. "Oh, for fuck's sake! Would you please stop?"

Valen glowered uncertainly. "Stop what?"

"Stop making such a big deal out of this!" I strode to the table, picked up a vase of hydrangeas, and added, "Here. I'll help!" Then I upended the vase all over the carpet. Water splashed. Flowers dropped. I stomped on them a couple of times, just to get my point across. Then, because I felt like my point needed a little more emphasis, I turned, drew a surge of strength from the power in me, and hurled the vase through the nearest French door. The door vanished in an explosion of glass and splinters. The vase, undeterred, kept going for a few more feet, flying in a graceful arc over the patio before it finally hit the flagstones and shattered. Before the glass had even finished falling, I spun back to Valen. "There. See? I've made a mess, and nobody died!" I threw my hands in the air. "God, Valen! This is ridiculous! Would you please just relax? It's not real, and even if it was, you could trash this whole place and I still wouldn't give a shit!" I pointed at the carpet. "Hell, you could dump a huge, steaming pile of cow shit all over that-" I stopped in mid-rant. I sniffed. "Wait. What's that smell?"

Valen stopped staring at me long enough to look down. His eyebrows lifted. "Well, if I had to guess, the smell is coming from the huge, steaming pile of manure that just appeared on the carpet."

I looked down. There was indeed a huge, steaming pile of shit on the carpet. I couldn't tell whether it really had come from a cow, but I was positive it hadn't been there five seconds ago. I paused, put my hands on my hips, and stared. "Huh. How'd _that_ happen?"

Valen frowned. "I think…you might have thought of it. Dreamed it here, so to speak."

I eyed the mysterious pile of poop. It had landed right on top of the poor hydrangeas. "You mean I imagined shit, and shit literally happened?"

Valen's lips twitched. "In a word? Yes." He looked from the mess on the carpet, to me, to what was left of the door, to the pile of broken crystal on the patio, and finally, back to me. Then he started laughing.

I gaped at him. "What's so damn funny?"

He looked up at me, laugh lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. " _You,_ " he managed. Then he looked at the mess again and another gale swept him up in its wake, and he couldn't even get any more words out after that. It was as if a dam had burst, and all that pent-up _everything_ was coming out, manifesting itself in that ridiculously beautiful, breathless laughter.

I stared at him helplessly. I wanted to be annoyed with him, but I couldn't. Not with him laughing like that. Not even if it was at my expense. I crossed my arms over my chest and tapped my foot on the floor, trying to at least _act_ annoyed. "Fine. Just let me know when you're done."

Valen didn't answer. He was laughing so hard he had to lean against the fireplace mantel just to stay upright. This turned out to be a bad idea, since the poker was right behind him. That wouldn't even have been a problem, but the poker was only loosely propped against the wall. _That_ wouldn't even have been a problem if not for his tail, which as usual seemed to have a mind of its own. It swept sideways, knocking the poker right into the hearth.

The clatter was spectacular, but not so half as spectacular as his reaction, which was to spin around, draw his weapon, and lash out on pure, embattled reflex.

Tchotke exploded off of the mantel. A silver candlestick bounced off of the floor near my feet, bent into an L-shape. Another one went through the window. Matchboxes showered matches, pottery ruptured, and the urn with Grandpa Hirschel's ashes spiraled through the air like a football, spraying its contents as it went.

The dust settled. I looked at Valen, standing red-faced amidst the carnage. Then _I_ started to laugh.

Valen glared at me half-heartedly. "This is not funny," he growled.

"Is too," I gasped. I sat on the floor, because my legs wouldn't hold me up anymore. "You know that was my granddad you just spilled all over the floor?"

Valen's face got even redder. He looked guiltily at the broken urn and passed a hand over his face. "Ah, Hells. I am sorry-"

"Don't worry. Didn't do him any harm." I giggled. "He was already dead."

Valen stared at me. Then he groaned and slid down the wall to join me on the floor. "I give up." He looked around at the disaster area we'd created and winced. "Neither of us should be allowed indoors."

"No kidding." My laughter finally subsided into chuckles. I leaned over my knees and tried to catch my breath. Why were we laughing? We were probably in mortal danger, and what was our response? Trash the place and laugh like loons. "What's wrong with us?"

Valen grunted sourly and rubbed one of his horns. "I cannot speak for you, but I know exactly what is wrong with me."

That put a damper on my mood. _You may not know what's wrong with me now, but if you stick around, you'll find out._

Uneasy silence fell. I cleared my throat and cast about for something to say. My eyes scanned the empty house. They fell on the sofa table. At first, I couldn't figure out what had drawn my eye. Then I saw the radio. It was sitting on top of a pile of magazines. I was pretty sure it hadn't been there before. I thought it had belonged to my grandmother – it was one of those old, boxy beige-and-brown ones, with two knobs and plastic grill and big metal antenna. It was also, unless I misremembered, supposed to be in the music room, not here. "Um. Valen?"

"Yes?"

I pointed at the radio. "Was that there before?"

He looked over sharply, then frowned. "I cannot recall." He stood, though not before casting a sharp glance backwards and yanking his tail toward his shins to make sure it wasn't going to knock anything _else_ over. "What is it?"

"A radio."

Valen looked at me blankly. "A what?"

"Um." _Oh, god._ How was I going to explain this one? I scratched my cheek. "It's...a machine that, um, sort of…transmits sound. Or not really transmits. More like receives. Or maybe both, I guess. Actually, I'm not sure how it works." My face went red. "It's…really hard to explain. Sorry."

The radio buzzed, and suddenly, there was a voice coming over it, although it was badly broken up by static. "Wh…t'rbl….bldy…expl…n…becile."

That voice sounded familiar. I yelped and lunged for the radio, almost falling over the sofa in the process. "Enserric? Is that you?" I crouched by the table and turned the dials, but that just got me more static. "Where are you? I can barely hear you."

"…n't…ough…tr…tenna!"

 _Tenna? What the fuck's a tenna?_ I thought for a second. Then I got it. _Oh!_ He wanted me to adjust the antenna. _Okay. I can do that_. I fiddled with the antenna, extending it and twisting it this way and that in search of a signal. "This is ridiculous. You couldn't find anything a little higher tech?" A loud burst of static came through the speaker. It sounded like an expletive. "All right, all right. Don't get your knickers in a knot. I'm working on it."

Next to me, Valen picked up a magazine and started flipping through it. Within a few pages, his curiousity had turned into fascination. "This is amazing. I have never seen such detailed pictures, and in so many colors." He turned a couple more pages, engrossed. "It must have cost a fortune to print this."

I stared up at him. _There's a tiefling standing in my old dining room, and he's reading a back issue of TIME magazine_. The only saving grace was that this wasn't really real. If it had been, I thought I might finally have been able to say that my life had reached its zenith of weirdness. I shook my head and turned back to the radio. "It's not really that expensive," I answered absently. "It'll cost you about five bucks at the newsstand. They publish a new one every week." I finally found a position the antenna seemed to like. Then I started turning the radio's dial again, slowly, hunting for that sweet spot where the signal was strongest, and…

A voice like a DMV clerk who'd been huffing bath salts erupted from the speaker. "FINALLY!" Enserric screamed. "It took you bloody long enough!"

Valen dropped the magazine and jumped back in alarm. His hand flashed to his flail. Then his brain caught up with his reflexes, and he lowered his hand, looking confused and slightly embarrassed. "Ah, Rebecca?"

"Yeah?"

"The radio is speaking. Is that normal?"

It was nice to know there were still some things in the universe that could surprise him. "Mostly. The talking part, anyway. The Enserric part, not so much." I sat back on my heels. "So, Enserric. When you're done yelling, could you maybe tell me why you're broadcasting on the FM dial?"

The sword's annoyed sigh crackled through the speaker. "It was the only way to get through to you."

I frowned. "Explain."

Enserric obliged. "The Elder Brain has put your mind into some kind of trance. You are dreaming, wielder. Or hallucinating. Or having a mental breakdown. Or perhaps a mix of all three. It is…rather difficult to understand, much less explain. Let us simply say that you are, in a very real sense, lost in your own mind. I was obliged to find a mode of communication that your mind would accept in its present state."

I looked up and met Valen's eyes. They reflected my own confusion. Memories trickled back. My eyes went wide. "Shit. Zorvak'mur."

Enserric's voice was grave. "Just so."

I swallowed. More memories were coming in. They were disjointed. That only made them feel more nightmarish. "So it got into my head after all, is what you're saying."

"To an extent, but it is not having as easy a time of it as it supposed." The sword's voice was insufferably smug. "I do not think it realized that your mind and mine were so closely connected, and as I am technically undead, it has no influence over _my_ mind." His smugness was heading rapidly from insufferable to unbearable. "Thus, I have been able to shield your mind with mine." He paused. "Somewhat."

My heart rose. "Enough to get us out of here?"

Enserric's pause spoke volumes, even before his response came. "That will be rather trickier, I am afraid. The Elder Brain's attention is quite strongly bent on keeping you in this state."

My heart fell down to my toes. "So how _do_ we get out of here?"

"Unclear. I believe that the answer lies somewhere in the maze of your mind. Or should I say _minds_ , because yours is clearly not the only mind caught in this web."

I looked at Valen. "Oh, shit."

The tiefling's frown was more confused than upset. "How is such a thing possible?"

Enserric chuckled evilly. "Why, through the simplest magic there is: touch."

I frowned. "Touch? What do you-" A memory came - a hand on my shoulder, rough with scars. My eyes went to Valen's hands. They'd seen heavy use during all his years of fighting, and his knuckles were criss-crossed, gouged, and pebbled with scar tissue. "Oh." I cleared my throat. "Right. Our hands were touching. Right."

"Yes." Enserric's voice was tragically resigned, in the manner of someone who was really doing his best and making enormous sacrifices in spite of the ignorance and ingratitude of those around him. "Your mind has been entrapped, and you have dragged us both along for the ride."

I looked at Valen. Tears filled my eyes. "Shit." Guilt dug its black claws into my guts and twisted. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean-"

Valen shook his head. "No. Do not be. This was not your fault." A smile flickered across his face. "As a matter of fact, I am glad. It is better this way."

I huffed a bitter laugh, sniffed, and looked away. "Better? How?"

Valen shrugged. "This way, you need not face this alone, and I need not torment myself with the fear that there was something I might have done to help you, and did not."

I stared up at him. A grateful lump rose in my throat. "You're too good for this world, you know that?" I laughed, less bitterly. "For any world, really."

I'd have thought he'd be pleased at the compliment, but the expression that crossed his face then was mostly just sad. "Would that that were true."

I made my voice firm. "It is true. And don't argue with me this time. I'm serious."

At that, Valen smiled a little and held up his hands for peace. "I would not dream of it."

I hmph'ed. "Damn straight." A horrifying thought occurred to me. "Shit. Deekin." The bard wasn't here, which must have meant that he hadn't been drawn into this dream along with us. "Is he okay?"

Enserric didn't sound too terribly concerned. "We are in the realm of thought, where time does not flow as it does in the physical world. As near as I can tell, mere instants have passed since the Elder Brain drew you here. Assuming that you are able to escape, I believe your little bard is in no immediate danger."

I swallowed hard. "And if we can't escape?"

"Then you will all be thralls together."

That was clear enough, not to mention horrifying. Because it was better than thinking, I busied myself with standing and adjusting my wardrobe, which didn't really need adjusting, as a good portion of it was made of metal. "All right. So, you said the way out lies in our minds. Where?"

Enserric clucked his nonexistent tongue in thought. "Difficult to say, but I believe it will be a matter of finding the weak spots in the Elder Brain's psionic net."

"Good." I stood up. "Where's the nearest one?" The radio went silent. I started to worry. "Enserric?" A strangely familiar electric _hummm-tink_ caught my attention, and I turned.

There was something flickering into existence above the door I'd so thoroughly shattered. It faded in and out a couple of times, and then, all it once, it snapped into solidity.

I looked up at the thing above the door. It was a white rectangle with red lettering on it, which read, 'EXIT'.

Enserric's voice crackled. The static was coming back in. "There," he said, sounding satisfied. "In you go. Quickly, before the Elder Brain finds the hole and seals it. And remember – _none of this is real_. You are in the realm of thought and memory, both of which are notoriously malleable."

Valen rubbed his chin. His eyes were alight with dawning comprehension. "Here, in our own minds, we decide what is real."

"Quite – although do bear in mind that the Elder Brain will try to assert its own reality. Your challenge will lie in rejecting its reality and substituting your own." His voice faded. The exit sign glowed. "Good luck, wielder – and this time, _please_ pay attention when I am trying to speak to you." The last echoes of his voice sounded testy. "I _do_ abhor shouting."

The 'EXIT' sign glowed steadily as we approached. Valen and I both looked up at it. "So," I said.

The tiefling looked at me. "So."

A shit-eating grin plastered itself across my face. I couldn't resist. "How about this door? Is this door okay?"

Valen wore that look of put-upon amusement he often got when I cracked wise. "Stop talking and go through the door, Rebecca."

"I just wanted to make sure. I know how you feel about strange doors-"

"Go. Through. The. Door."

I laughed, relented, and studied the door again. My mood darkened. "I don't know what's past this." I touched one hand to my chest. The scabbard was gone, and Enserric with it. Given the choice between a dream where I had no weapon and a dream where I had no pants on, pantsless won, hands down. "We should probably go in armed. For what good it'll do."

Valen touched the hilt of his flail. It looked as solid as he was, as if he and everything he wore were real in a way nothing else here was. "I have what I need." He studied me critically. "And you?"

I thought, then spoke tentatively. "Enserric said this place was malleable, didn't he?"

"As malleable as our own thoughts." Valen shrugged. "Whatever _that_ means."

I swallowed. "Right. Well. Here goes." Because it seemed like the thing to do, I held my hands out, palms up.

Then I remembered.

I remembered weight and heft, balanced perfectly along a length of wood a little taller than a man. I remembered warm, living wood, tingling under my fingers. I remembered a glint of silver-green, like a far ocean, and I remembered a streak of black like a rift in the world.

At first, nothing happened. And then, it did, going from my memory to the real world - or maybe, since this wasn't really real, just going from the back of my mind to the front.

I stared at the staff in my hands. For a second, I couldn't breathe. Then my breath left me in a shaky sigh. "Oh."

Valen looked at Silent Partner. Then he looked at my face. His face softened. "Is that what I think it is?"

I had to clear my throat a couple of times before I could answer. "Yes." My fingers tightened on Silent Partner, then briefly, I raised it to my lips and kissed its warm wooden haft. _Good to have you back, old friend_. I lowered the quarterstaff. "All right." I took a deep, steadying breath and touched my holy symbol. I wasn't alone. My Silent Partner was with me, Shaundakul was with me – and so, it seemed, was Valen. "I feel better now. Let's go." Then, before I could lose my nerve, I ducked through the door, Valen close behind me.

My foot came down on a cobblestone street. Almost immediately, someone jostled me. On reflex, I turned and scowled. "Hey, watch where you're-" Then I actually saw who I was talking to. My scowl turned into a gawk. "…going?"

The man who'd bumped into me saw my scowl and raised it. "Go hug razorvine, rube," he said in a voice like the crackling of flames, and swept away.

I stared after him. He had coal-black skin and orange eyes, but that wasn't really what caught my attention. No, what really caught my attention was the fact that his head was on fire. Flames flickered around his bald head. This seemed like a thing I should mention to him, just to be helpful, but then again, you'd think he'd have noticed by now, and anyway he wasn't screaming or running around or doing any of the things people usually did when they were on fire. He was just walking along, minding his own business, and, oh, by the way, _his head was on fire_.

I backed away. My foot splashed into a puddle. Cold, slimy water touched my skin. I jerked my foot back with a noise of disgust. "What the…"

"Careful," a familiar, husky voice warned. Hands clasped my shoulders, steadying me, stopping me before I'd gone too far. "Do you remember what I said about ooze puddles?"

That made me look up, and finally, I got a good look at where I'd ended up.

Narrow, crooked buildings leaned over the street, many of them in an advanced stage of dereliction. The air was choked with yellow smog, the stink was overwhelming, and the noise was worse – voices, music, clanks, bangs, the occasional scream, and over it all a constant, distant creaking and groaning, like the sound of an enormous machine under unfathomable stress.

I twisted around in Valen's grasp, meeting his blue eyes with a mix of relief and shock – relief, because it was him, and shock, because we _definitely_ weren't in Kansas anymore. "Is this…"

For a man who'd just come home, he didn't sound too pleased. "The Hive."


	48. The Hive

_A/N: Happy Monday! (Hey, any day's a good day for a new chapter, right?)_

* * *

 _I torture you  
_ _Take my hand through the flames  
_ _I torture you  
_ _I'm a slave to your games  
_ _I'm just a sucker for pain_

\- Lil Wayne, "Sucker For Pain"

~*~  
Chapter 48: The Hive  
~*~

I was glad I'd armed myself, because in one step, I'd crossed from a mansion to an urban wasteland.

The street we were on was narrow, crowded by tightly-packed houses that weren't so much structures as they were stacks of loosely associated rubble, one sneeze away from collapse. The metal roofs were steeply slanted and weeping rust. The windows were broken. Plaster was scarce, and where it existed, it was covered in graffiti.

The smog was thick and yellow and acrid. Also, the air smelled like the inside of a septic tank, which may have been owed to the fact that the street was bathed in runoff from the trash-choked gutters. Standing puddles rippled with a brown and oily sheen, promising a cocktail of cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, and lead poisoning, all in one gulp.

The people, on the other hand…well, there was no other hand. The people looked fully as strange and disreputable as their surroundings, with a few exceptions that just looked plain strange. Half of them were some flavor of human, but the other half weren't. Some weren't even close. Just like in Zorvak'mur, people of all races mingled here, and just like Zorvak'mur, I was pretty sure it was only because they had no other options.

A drow stumbled by, wafting a very un-elven stench. He was the only drow I'd ever seen who both looked and smelled like shit. The bottle he had in his hand might have had something to do with his state, or maybe it was his state that had led to the bottle. He tripped over a stoop as he went, earning himself a half-assed swat and a snarled 'Pike it!' from a half-orc in mismatched armor. The drow was lucky he didn't earn more, but the half-orc seemed more interested in the argument he was having with a man who could almost have passed for human if not for his forked tongue, which came out and tested the air nervously as the half-orc loomed a little too close for comfort.

A soft, malevolent chuckle made my head swivel. It had come from a tall, wiry humanoid who was loitering in the crooked lee of a crumbling lintel, watching the street show through slitted black eyes. His skin was olive-green, his hair was black, his features were angular to the point of being alien, and his smirk showed teeth like a shark. Unfortunately for him, his amusement was cut short as a centaur splashed through one of the noisome puddles, forcing him to hop out of the way with a spitting hiss like a startled cat.

My head swiveled again to watch the centaur go. I'd never seen a centaur, only heard of them, and now? I was watching one trot down the street, cursing and occasionally pausing to scrape a glob of indescribable goop from his hoof.

I shook my head and turned yet again, then froze. There was a _thing_ coming down the street. It had ebony skin, horns like a goat, wings like a bat, and a tail like a scorpion. It could have been a gargoyle, only it was made of flesh and radiated wrongness, like a slick of grease across my soul. If evil could take on physical form, I thought that was what it would look like.

I stepped out of the thing's way without thinking, hugged Silent Partner to my chest, and edged closer to Valen, like I was caught in a downpour and he was my umbrella. This didn't elicit a response. It dawned on me that Valen had gone awfully quiet. I turned, took one look at his face, and blurted, "Are you all right?"

Valen didn't answer. Like me, he was staring, but where I'd stared like I was seeing something new, Valen was staring like a man who was caught in an old, bad dream.

I followed his line of sight and saw a corpse being thrown into a wagon. The corpse was a woman with white skin and red hair. "Oh, shit," I said, softly but with feeling. I snuck a look at him and felt my heart tie itself in a knot of sympathy and embarassment. This was personal. I didn't want to see this, any more than he probably wanted me to see it. But here we were. "You need a minute?"

Valen watched the wagon's driver flop a filthy tarp over his mother's corpse. Then he tore his eyes away and trained his frown on me. "To do what?" His voice was taut. "I have had years. What will one more minute serve?"

"Remembering isn't the same as seeing it happen all over again." I knew. It had just happened to me.

Valen met my eyes. His cheeks colored, and he looked down, his anger fading and his tail drooping. "Yes," he said softly. "You are right. I am sorry. I…did not mean to snap."

"I know." I kept my voice low and soothing. "It's okay." If he hadn't apologized, it might not have been, because I sure as hell didn't deserve to have him take his anger out on me just because I was a convenient target – but he _had_ apologized, and really, I couldn't fault the guy for getting snippy when he was watching his own mother get loaded onto a meat wagon like a freshly slaughtered pig. Our psychic tormentor was obviously an equal opportunity asshole. I leaned on my quarterstaff and took another gander at the crowded, crooked street. I'd never seen anything like it before in my life. "So we're in your memories now, I take it."

Valen nodded. "Yes." His eyes scanned the street. "But why this memory, of all memories?"

I remembered the thing that had worn the faces of our dead. "It said it would break us."

Valen snorted. "Then the joke is on it." He took one last look at the corpse wagon as it trundled away, then squared his shoulders and spoke firmly. "This did not break me the first time. It will not break me the second."

I smiled. "That's the spirit." I studied the building his mom's body had just been evicted from. It was one of the nicer buildings on this street, which meant that it had real windows and no holes in the roof. It also had bars on the windows and a red lantern hanging outside the door.

As I watched, the red-lanterned door opened again, and someone was shoved out, stumbling over the threshold. It was the red-haired boy. He spun, opening his mouth as if to say something. The door slammed in his face. He stared at it. Then, like the ghost he was, he faded.

I looked back at Valen. He was staring at the place where his younger self had been. I couldn't help but ask. "Is this how you ended up on the streets?"

"Yes." Valen looked around in wary surprise, as if finally realizing that we were standing in the middle of the street, and drew me out of the way of traffic. He lowered his voice and spoke tersely. "My mother fell ill and could not keep up with the work demanded of her. The demoness she worked for killed her in a fit of rage over her failure to bring in the expected jink." He shrugged. "As I was of no use to her, just another mouth to feed, I was out on the street before my mother's body was cold."

He said it all so matter-of-factly that it took a few seconds for the full weight of his words to hit me. "God, Valen. That's awful."

"True." The tiefling rubbed his chin. "Though, to be honest with you, I have never been able to decide if mine was the luckier fate than the alternative."

I shuddered. "What was the alternative?"

His answer was painfully blunt. "To stay. Had the demoness cultivated a different set of clientele, I might simply have been forced to take my mother's place, and spent the rest of my life as a bed slave instead of a battle slave."

My mouth opened and closed a few times. The casual way he spoke about the possibility of being enslaved and forced to sell his tender young ass for pennies on the dollar was hair-raising. "That's awful, too."

Valen shrugged dismissively. "It is what it is, though it is also irrelevant. The past is gone and done. There is no use speculating on 'what if'." His voice hardened, and his hand caressed the hilt of his flail. "And I am no one's slave, now. If anyone thinks to change that, they are in for an unpleasant surprise."

I swallowed. "Yeah. On that note, how do we get out of here before Mister Brain-in-a-Vat decides to prove you wrong?"

Valen frowned. "I do not know." He looked around. "Enserric said that he would be here. Where is he?"

I listened. There was a faint buzzing in my ears. "I think I hear him. Hold on." The buzzing got louder when I closed my eyes, but I still couldn't make sense of it, so I reached down into the place under my heart and touched the power there, as if I could use it to draw the buzzing nearer to me.

A chill ran through me. Almost immediately after, the buzzing resolved itself into words. "A-ha! Much better," Enserric said jovially. "This time I did not even have to shout."

I opened my eyes just in time to see a skull floating through the air towards me. The skull was black and glossy and not entirely opaque, like polished obsidian, and there were sparkly red magical-ey runes carved all over it. I goggled at it. "Enserric? Is that you?"

The skull bobbed to a stop in front of my face. "Yes, and not a moment to soon, I see," it said primly. It looked Silent Partner up and down. " _Really_. And after all I have done for you, too." Enserric's voice rose tragically. If he'd had arms, he would have flung them in the air. "Is this how my loyal service is repaid? The moment I leave your hands, you take up with _another weapon_?"

I flushed, looked at Silent Partner, and clutched it close to me. It tingled reassuringly. My voice turned defensive. "What else was I supposed to do? I needed a weapon, and you were busy being…whatever the hell it is you are right now."

Enserric clacked his jaws. "Hah! A likely story."

"It's the truth." I shook my old weapon at my new weapon. "Now shut up and show some respect to your elders."

Enserric hmph'ed. "Respect? For that overgrown _twig_?"

"Hey! Watch who you're calling a twig, pigsticker." I couldn't believe I was having this conversation. Was he… "Wait. Are you _jealous_? Is that what's happening here?"

"Of course not! Jealous? I, Enserric the Gray, the most puissant and, dare I say, sharpest of blades ever to exist?" The skull sniffed, though gods only knew how. "Perish the thought."

I wasn't buying it. "You totally are," I insisted. "You've turned into a floating Halloween decoration, and now you're jealous that I had to find another weapon because you lost your edge. Literally."

Enserric's eyes blazed. "That is hardly _my_ fault." He nodded at Valen. "It was his mind that forced me into this shape."

Valen couldn't seem to stop staring at the skull. "Do you mean to say that _I_ turned you into a mimir?"

The skull rolled its glowing red eyes. "So it seems. I tried to retain my usual form, but this was the only form your mind would accept, so kindly refrain from blaming _me_ for your lack of creativity."

I looked back and forth between them, totally lost. "Wait, wait, wait. What's a mimir?"

Valen answered. "A repository of knowledge." He eyed Enserric with reluctant fascination. "There used to be one in the free library here. It would rattle off information on any subject, if you knew the right words to ask it." Suddenly, he grinned. "And it was almost impossible to shut up once it began speaking, so one might say it is a natural fit for Enserric." The skull bared its teeth at him, but didn't answer, probably because it would have proven him right.

I studied Enserric with renewed interest. "So he's basically a talking encyclopedia?" I snapped my fingers in front of the sword-slash-mimir's face. "Quick! What's the capital of Tethyr?"

"Go to the Abyss, you debauched witling."

I raised my eyebrows, then leaned over and spoke to Valen in a stage whisper. "I think he's broken. That's _totally_ not the capital of Tethyr." My little sally was rewarded with a soft snicker. I straightened, smirking, and spoke to Enserric again. "But seriously, you're here, so let's get down to business. You said we needed to find a weakness. Where is it?"

Enserric bobbed sedately in midair. He seemed to enjoy doing that, maybe because he didn't get the chance to move around much, usually being stuck in a sword and all. "We are looking for a door. A portal, to be precise."

"A door?" Valen crossed his arms over his chest and scowled at Enserric. "Wonderful. We are in the City of Doors, so that only leaves, oh, about an infinite number of possibilities."

Enserric heaved a weary sigh. "I swear, sometimes I think Deekin had it right when he compared you to a goat. You are certainly stubborn enough to merit the comparison." The skull's eyes flashed. " _Think_ , young man. We are not in the City of Doors. We are in your _memory_ of the City of Doors. That limits our possibilities rather sharply."

Valen flushed, but didn't relax his belligerent stance. "Not enough." He gestured around us without unfolding his arms. "On this street alone there are hundreds of doors and windows and bounded spaces that might be portals in disguise. Any one might be the one we seek, and while we search, the Elder Brain will only continue to try to trap us here. Permanently."

I didn't really want to think about that. There _had_ to be a way out. Deekin was counting on us to find a way out, not to mention a whole lot of other people. "Maybe we can narrow this down," I said to Enserric. "Do you have any sense of where the portal is, or what it looks like? "

Enserric pivoted towards me. His voice became marginally more civil. "I cannot be certain of its location, but I feel that it is near - and that it is a portal our tiefling friend has encountered before."

Valen frowned in mystification. "A portal I have…" He trailed off. His eyes widened. "Oh."

I searched his face. "What is it?"

Valen spoke slowly, as if reluctant to share. When he spoke, I thought I knew why. "When I escaped the Abyss, I did not come directly to your…" He paused, and corrected himself. "…or rather, to the Seer's world. I would have, had I known where a portal might be found, but I did not, and at the time I was in no condition to search for it. I was weak, wounded, and alone in the Abyss. I knew that my first priority must be escape. All else could come after." His face darkened, and he looked down, flushing. "I…did, however, know where to find a portal to Sigil, so I…did what was necessary to gain passage through it." He cleared his throat. "Once in Sigil, I sought the dark on portals to the Prime. I soon found the right portal, though not soon enough for my tastes." He ran a hand through his hair and looked up again, a frown marring his face. "I would have thought that it would be good to be back, but I discovered that it was…not so easy to come home again, after…after everything."

I thought of how it felt to come home and see strangeness in places that had once been so familiar. "I can imagine."

Valen shook his head. "No," he ground out. "I do not think you can." His face was drawn. "There is no place in Sigil that does not teem with people, and the Hive in particular lives up to its name. It is noisy, chaotic, and unpredictable – and, after years in the Abyss, I found it unbearable."

I remembered how anxious he'd acted on the quiet streets of Lith My'athar. "Too many people?" I guessed.

Valen twisted his mouth and hitched his shoulders. "Too many people, too many sights, too many sounds, and I could no longer tell which were safe and which were threats." He looked away, his face drawn and tense. "In the Abyss, it is easy. Everything is dangerous. Here, it is not so clear-cut. My battle instincts, which had served me so well on the field, served me poorly in the city. I spent every waking moment fighting the urge to kill everyone around me, and I slept little, because when I slept, I dreamed that I was back in the Abyss, and woke in an unreasoning rage."

He had the start of a frown-line forming between his eyebrows. I wished I could take it from him, just pluck it right out and pull it to pieces and place the pieces at the corners of his eyes and mouth, where they would become laugh lines, instead. "Why were you so angry?" I asked quietly.

Valen lifted his head to stare at me. His mouth tightened, and then he spoke – quiet, quick, and seething, as if the words were a poison leeching out of him. "I was angry because I was exhausted and in pain. I was angry at myself for what I had become. I was angry at the multiverse for making me into something I hated. I was angry because I saw people going about their daily business, taking so many things for granted and complaining over trivialities, while everyone I had ever loved was dead and countless others like me were even then suffering untold agonies in the Abyss. I was angry because I was living every moment on the knife's edge between demon and man, and I did not know to which side I would fall if pushed." He stopped, finally, and drew a deep breath, and when it left him, his shoulders slumped, and his voice went quiet, almost resigned. "I was angry because I was angry, at everything and everyone, and I was afraid that I would never be able to stop being so angry, which only made me angrier."

I watched him. He didn't look angry. He just looked tired as all hell. "You don't seem so angry now."

Valen's posture eased, bit by bit. "No," he said, after a long and pensive pause. "Thanks to the Seer, I am…better. Though it is still a struggle, sometimes, to keep the anger at bay. I fear it is a battle I will be fighting for the rest of my life." Sadness weighed heavy at the corners of his lips. Then he squared his shoulders and changed the subject. "Regardless, if I had to venture a guess, the portal we want is the portal which led me to the Seer."

"That makes sense," I mused. "I mean, if we're looking for a way out of our heads and back to Toril, why not the portal that got you there in the first place?"

Valen nodded. "Yes. That was exactly my thought."

I grinned. "Great minds think alike." I looked around to get my bearings, and failed. Where had all the street signs gone? For that matter, where had the north pole gone? I couldn't feel the familiar tug, and had never seen these streets before, and something told me it would be useless to ask for a map. _I can't believe this. A Windwalker, lost._ I swallowed my pride and asked, "Do you remember where this portal was?"

"I do," Valen answered, immediately soothing my incipient case of nerves. "It is not far from here." With renewed determination, he set off down the street, jerking his head at me to follow. "Stay close. This may not be the Hive in truth, but it is close enough that I do not think it would be wise for us to become separated."

I couldn't argue with that. I hurried to catch up, Silent Partner tapping the cobbles and Enserric bobbing along behind me. A slight breeze made eddies swirl in the yellow smog. I touched my holy symbol and breathed slightly easier, although not by much. The air quality here would have given the health inspectors back home fits. "Where are we going?"

Valen nodded at an alleyway. "In here, first of all," he said, and turned, moving with the sure step of someone who knew exactly where he was going, his tail swaying almost jauntily. Lopsided houses closed over our heads, rickety planks laid between them as crosswalks. Light slanted through them, pale and sickly. "There is a tavern on the corner of Lot's and Two Lamp which was built over a permanent portal system – one to the Prime, and one to each of the four elemental planes," Valen went on. "The owner keeps them well-guarded. The only way to gain access to them is to pay for admission to the back rooms, where he keeps the arena, and go several rounds with his pet cyclops – with the caveat that you are allowed to bring no weapons, spells, or enchanted items into the ring with you. If you survive, you are granted access. If not…" He drew a finger across his throat. "Cyclops feed."

I just barely remembered to close my mouth before a fly flew into it, which was a definite risk around here. "You fought a cyclops _bare-handed_?""

Valen flushed, but for once, he seemed pleased, not embarrassed. "Not entirely. Contenders are given a pair of spiked gloves." He smirked and tapped his horns. "Also, I have these."

I squinted at his horns in perplexity. "Wasn't he a little tall to headbutt?"

Valen growled a little under his breath. "I hit him in the back of the knee. If you must know."

Like hell was I going to let him leave the story at that. Besides, this situation was bad enough without having to suffer it in silence, so I filled it with noise, instead. "Then what did you do?"

"Then I killed him. Why are you so curious about this?"

"Because you fought a cyclops bare-handed. How did you kill him?"

"You are not going to stop badgering me until I answer the question, are you?"

"Nope," I admitted cheerily. "So, how'd you kill him?"

Valen answered with a grudging sigh. "I gouged his eye out."

"What with? And tell me you didn't have to do that with your head."

"Hellfire, no. I had spiked gauntlets."

"You mean to tell me you punched a cyclops in the eyeball until he died?"

Valen frowned an arrested frown, as if I'd just come up with some novel idea. "I have never thought about it that way, but yes," he admitted. "I suppose that, in the strictest sense, that is what happened."

I whistled. " _Damn_ , Valen. That's hardcore."

He waved a hand as if to dismiss my admiration, but his blush gave him away. "It was what I had to do, so I did it." He shrugged. "I could just as easily have died. I was lucky. My gamble paid off. For many others, it did not."

"Yeah, but you did it, and they didn't." I shook my head. "You're a scrappy son of a bitch, aren't you?"

Valen rolled his eyes. "Says the woman who picked a fight with a demon-flesh golem."

"I'm still waiting for you to let me live that one down."

"Which, if I do not miss my guess, would make this the first time in your life that you have ever waited for anything."

I laughed. "Ouch. All right. You win this round."

He smirked. "A rare feat. I shall treasure my victory."

He was lucky he was so cute when he was feeling cocky. "You do that, sunshine."

We zigged and zagged and finally emerged from the alleyway, and Valen exhaled in relief. "Ah. I remembered right." He held out one hand. "Here we are. Shatterbone Street."

I grounded Silent Partner and took a good look around me. This street, just like the first, was as crooked, winding, and narrow as an old London back alley, only far filthier. It was also only present in patches. A gray, formless, eye-sucking void obscured some of the side streets and houses, as if they weren't quite _there._ Valen had said that he had holes in his memory that you could drive a herd of rothé through, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I was now looking at those holes. Not that I was going to say as much to Valen. We both needed all the confidence we could get, and it would probably undermine his if I were to point out that his time in the Abyss might have left him ever-so-slightly brain damaged. Besides, he probably already knew that, anyway. "This place is a maze," I complained instead. "How do you know where you're going?"

Valen shrugged. "I just do." He scanned the street. His eyes paused at a knot of ragged, dirty kids that were lurking in the questionable shelter of an alleyway. They were crouched over something that might have been a game of jacks, only they were playing it with a set of knucklebones, and I didn't want to know whose knuckles they were using. As if he'd felt us watching, one of them looked up. He was black-haired and might have passed for human, if not for the dusky gray hue of his skin and the fact that he was crouched on a pair of cloven hooves instead of feet. Valen stared at the boy as if he'd seen yet another ghost. His tail went still. "Hellfire."

I watched the kids, although one look at their faces told me that they weren't children, and hadn't been for a while. In terms of general world-weariness and cynicism, these kids were eight going on eighty. Every so often, the red-haired boy appeared among them. "Friends of yours?"

Valen hesitated for a while before answering. "Yes. Of a sort."

The kids looked like a pack of street urchins, which was in line with how he'd once described himself. "Your old gang?"

Valen took a deep breath, then nodded. "For a time." He took one last look at his old crew. Then he beckoned to me and started walking again, speaking as he went. "Pax, their leader, found me that first night on the street. He would have robbed me, but of course I had nothing worth his while, so he gave me a token beating and then allowed me to kip the night with them, more from pity than anything else."

I blinked. "That's one hell of a way to say hello."

Valen laughed. "The story of my life," he said drily. "I have long since lost count of how many people and creatures have introduced themselves by trying to beat the..." He paused. "That is, by trying to beat me bloody."

I had a feeling I'd almost been graced with a bit of enlightening Cager profanity, and was a little disappointed that he'd stopped himself short. "Looks like none of them succeeded."

"Not yet, no." He shook his head. "Sad as it is to say it, however, I was willing to tolerate a certain amount of abuse in exchange for the relative safety of numbers. For his part, Pax made me his errand boy and punching bag." Valen smirked. "Until I finally lost my temper and knocked several of his teeth out."

I chuckled. "Bet he got a lot more polite after that."

"Yes." Valen's smile was brief, but full of fond reminiscence. "From that point on, we were friends. Pax taught me a great deal about how to survive on the street. He had the most damnable luck, and a knack for getting himself both into and out of the most improbable scrapes." His smile faded. "Of course, eventually even Pax's luck ran out."

I looked up. The sky, or whatever was up there past the layer of smog, had darkened. So, when I looked at it, had the street, and it was emptier, as if we'd suddenly stepped from the afternoon hustle into the early morning hush. "What happened?" I asked.

Almost before the echoes of my voice had faded, a corpse appeared in the street. It was black-haired and cloven-hoofed, and its brains were all over the pavement.

Valen stopped and stared at the corpse. His face went blank, and his voice went grim. "That." He looked a few moments longer, then he looked away and started walking again, with the deliberate air of someone who'd made the conscious choice not to linger or to look. "He cut the wrong purse. Got his head bashed in for his troubles."

I stepped past the dead boy. There was a brick lying near his caved-in skull. I was glad he was lying belly-down. I didn't want to see what that brick had made of his face. "What a shitty way to go," I said, because there didn't seem to be much more to say.

Valen shrugged without looking at me. "Better that than a slow death by starvation – or years spent suffering as a slave in the Abyss." His laugh was brief and dark. "There have been many times since when I have envied Pax."

There was a ghost-figure lurking in the shadows at the edge of the street. He had red hair, stubby horns, stark white skin, and stared at the body with eyes that were far too old for his young face. After a while, he looked around warily, stepped out, knelt by the corpse, laid something by it, and slipped away, vanishing into an alleyway. I looked at what he had left with his dead friend. It looked like a fingerbone jack, and it damn near broke my heart. I looked away. "At least you're still alive," I told the Valen-of-now.

"True." Valen said it with a sigh. "And the past is past and beyond changing, so there is no use dwelling on it." He hitched his shoulders under his armor, as if shaking a demon off his back. "I simply need to keep reminding myself that this is only a...a hallucination," he said, and he did sound more like he was talking to himself than to me. "We are not truly in Sigil, and I am a seasoned warrior now, not some desperate, half-starved street rat. I can face this."

He was right. _This isn't really happening._ "If you're ever in doubt, just look at me," I offered. "You know I've never been to Sigil, and there's no way I could have gotten here this easily in this short a time, so as long as you can see me standing here, you know this can't be real."

Valen looked back at me and nodded. "Yes. Thank you. That does help." He flashed me a quick smile, then faced front. "We should keep moving. Standing targets make for easy targets."

He was paranoid, but given the ambiance, I couldn't blame him. "All right," I said, and followed him.

As we walked along the street, a dim, diffuse light grew, permeating the smog. People began to appear – hazy figures, as if in a dream. Drunks slumped on door stoops. Shady transactions took place on street corners. A fight broke out in front of a tavern, and a crowd gathered, jeering and shouting and tossing down coins that were obviously meant as bets, until one of the brawlers' knives found a home in his opponent's throat, and in short order the winning betters had collected their coins, the winning brawler had staggered off, and the corpse collector was halting his wagon by the loser and hoisting him aboard, still bleeding freely. Nobody paused to look. The wagon creaked away and got absorbed into one of those patches of memory void.

Elsewhere, the street scene was a little less insane. Even in the Hive, folks had to eat, and Shatterbone Street was lined with food vendors of all kinds. These memories were a little more vivid. We passed a stooped old lady in a ragged apron. There was a rusted steel drum in front of her, full of glowing coals, and there was a pot burbling away on top of the coals. "Rat stew!" she called, and banged her spoon against the pot. "Lovely rats, fat rats, so fresh their little pawsies is still wrigglin'!"

I gave in to curiosity and peered into the pot. I immediately regretted it. Tiny, curled pink paws were floating amidst a green scum and what I chose to believe were potatoes. None of it was wriggling, which I counted as a small blessing. The lady grinned at me. "Got a hankerin' for my little ratsies, cutter?"

I wished I knew as many languages as Deekin, just so I could say 'no' in all of them. "No, that's all right," I demurred, and moved on dazedly, before she could try to entice me with a free sample, on the house. I didn't bother to ask if she was up to date on her health inspections. There was obviously no use having health inspections in the Hive. It would have been like installing smoke detectors in Hell.

A man with a funny cylindrical hat shouted from a cart that smelled like grease and mint. "Mint bread!" he hollered, brandishing a paper-wrapped chunk of fried dough. When I looked closer, it was studded with green leaves, and the whole cart had a surprisingly agreeable smell in its immediate vicinity, though as soon as I was a few paces away the general fug of trash and corrosive smog and unwashed bodies closed in on me with a vengeance.

"Meat pies!" screamed another vendor. He had a tray of golden, dome-shaped pastries around his neck. "Fried maggots!" shouted yet another. The tray around her neck didn't bear contemplating. "Rankest maggots you'll find this side of the Styx! A fiendish delight, and only a green a dozen!" A stubby, bat-winged creature with a face like a frog and spikes all over its robes stopped and passed over a handful of coins in exchange for a rolled-up paper full of the unspeakable things. It trudged down the street, crunching the batter-fried maggots between its jagged teeth with every sign of enjoyment.

I wasn't sure whether to laugh, puke, or run. I opted to clutch Silent Partner a little more tightly and inch a little closer to Valen. My elbow bumped his accidentally. He glanced at me and frowned. "Are you all right?" he asked.

I'd be damned if I admitted that his city was freaking me the fuck out. "Fine."

Valen didn't seem so convinced. "You have gone unusually quiet."

That was what I got for never shutting up – on the rare occasions that I did stop talking, people noticed. "I'm fine," I insisted. "I'm just…absorbing. It's a lot to take in." To distract myself, I looked up. The smog was a little clearer now, and between the steep and looming rooflines, I finally caught a glimpse of sky, sparkling with stars. At least, I thought they were stars. When I realized what they actually were, I squeaked and stopped dead in my tracks. "V-valen?"

He stopped, too, looking at me with sudden concern. "What is wrong?"

What I'd taken for stars weren't stars – they were lights. On buildings. Which were hanging upside-down from the sky. Or was I the one hanging upside-down? Suddenly, I couldn't tell, and on instinct I reached out with my free hand for the nearest solid object, which happened to be Valen's forearm. "There are buildings in the sky, Valen," I wheezed. "Valen, why are there buildings in the sky?"

Valen made a noise that sounded suspiciously like the start of a laugh and turned his face away for a second. When he looked back, his face was straight. "That is not the sky," he told me. "That is Sigil."

I stared at him gormlessly. "Run that by me again?"

He sighed and tried. "Sigil is built on the inside of a…a ring, I suppose you might call it." He gestured to the not-sky above our heads. "Wherever you are, if you look up, and if the air is clear enough, you can see across the ring to the other Wards." He looked up. "That is rarely the case, in the Hive, but every so often the portals to the Plane of Air open up and blow the smog away, and you remember that there is a great deal more to the city than this sad, scrabbling cesspit."

I didn't dare look up. Every time I looked up, my head spun and I felt like I was going to hurl. "It's built on the inside of a ring," I repeated flatly.

"Yes."

"On top of an infinite spire."

"Yes."

"Valen, your city makes no fucking sense."

He wasn't laughing, but his eyes were. "Sigil is not here to make sense. Sigil is here to be Sigil."

There were roofs up there, pointing down – or up? – at the roofs down here. Roofs weren't supposed to do that. "Fine. All I'm saying is that I'd be happier if this half of Sigil could point in the same direction as the other half of Sigil."

Valen looked at my face and chuckled softly. "Try not to look up, if it bothers you so much."

I gulped. "I'm trying." We turned a corner and reached a relatively open square. My eyes rolled skywards. I grabbed his arm again. "Aaaaand I'm failing."

Valen stopped again and sighed again. " _Primes_ ," he muttered, in a voice I didn't think I was meant to hear. "Thank the Lady this is not the real thing, or your Cagestruck self would be at the head of a parade of bobbers and cony-catchers by now." His hand came up, hesitated, then patted mine, very tentatively. "Do not worry, Rebecca." His voice was gently amused. "I shall not let you fall into the Clerk's Ward. I promise."

What was wrong with me? I'd faced all kinds of scary shit, but here I was, falling to pieces just because Sigil had taken one look at the laws of physics and told them to go blow. I blushed in embarrassment, but still couldn't quite make myself pry my fingers from Valen's arm. "S-sorry."

"Do not be." His voice was mild. "Most people find me frightening. I do not know by what madness you have come to view me as a safe haven, but if it is madness, it is…a welcome sort of madness."

First he called me crazy, then he said that he was okay with crazy. That was it: the man was officially crazy. "Okay." My voice was a little weak. "I won't be sorry, then." I knew I should really let go, because this was _so_ not in line with my resolution to keep my distance, but he was big and warm and solid and firmly attached to the pavement so maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I just held on a little longer. It was just his arm, anyway. Arms were okay. Arms were neutral territory. It wasn't like I'd grabbed his crotch or anything.

Valen led me onward. After a couple minutes of walking, he touched my hand again. "Look up, Rebecca. You should find this a pleasanter sight than the ring."

I braved a quick peek. We were passing in front of a building that looked almost clean, and had its door propped wide open. Inside, I caught a glimpse of long wooden tables and well-scrubbed floors. There were vases of cheery paper flowers on the tables, and colorful paper streamers dangling from the ceiling. It was like walking from a crime scene into a kindergarten classroom, or would have been if not for the line of ragged, obviously hungry people that stretched out of the door and all the way around the block. Slowly, my fingers relaxed their death grip on Valen's forearm. "What is this place?"

The tiefling smiled at the weirdly cheery place. "Allesha's pantry. "

I looked again. "It's a soup kitchen?"

"Yes. Allesha Sheevis owned it." Valen chuckled his quiet chuckle. "Still does, I would hope, unless we have finally scared her off."

That caught my attention. "We? You make it sound like she's not a Hiver."

"No, she is not. She was born in the Clerk's Ward, to a wealthy family."

"Really?" I studied the building with growing interest. It was dilapidated, but at least someone had made an effort to shore up the sagging roof, scrub the graffiti from the walls, and hang clean curtains in the windows. "So how'd she end up running a soup kitchen in the Hive?"

Valen arched an eyebrow at me. "The same way _you_ abandoned your wealth and devoted your life to roaming the Prime like a rootless vagabond, I would imagine."

 _I_ knew why I'd left home, but I was suddenly curious to know what he thought. "All right. So why did I do it?"

Valen shrugged. "Wanderlust. Compassion. And perhaps a little guilt."

 _Damn it_. "Interesting take." Just because the man was too perceptive by half didn't mean I was going to admit he was right. It did mean I was going to change the subject, though. "So, was that why Allesha did it?"

"More or less. Allesha's father was a slumlord who made his fortune off the backs of destitute Hivers. She did not know this until his death, and the truth so horrified her that she vowed to undo the damage he had done."

There was an almost festive air around the soup kitchen. People were chatting. Laughter rose, most of it centered on a tall woman who moved up and down the line like a friendly whirlwind. She was tall, skinny, bald as an egg, had a golden hoop in each ear and one through her nose, and was unrepentantly loud, exchanging boisterous greetings and the occasional affectionate insult with the people waiting for their meals. It was a surprisingly normal, happy scene for a place otherwise so steeped in misery. "Looks like she succeeded."

Valen shrugged. "I do not know about that. There is a great deal damage to undo, and the conditions in the Hive are a problem that Sigil has tried and failed to solve for centuries – when it has tried at all." Then he looked at the place and smiled. "But at least she has helped to make it…not so bad. There were many of us who would have starved without her."

I couldn't help but share his smile. "She sounds amazing."

"She was. She is. She cares, fiercely, about the welfare of others, and none more so than those who have no one else to care for them." He paused, snuck a glance at me, and spoke very carefully. "You…remind me of her, actually. In some ways."

Suddenly, Silent Partner was the only thing holding me up. _Okay, I did not just hear that. Valen "I Have A Burning Grudge Against the Entire Universe" Shadowbreath did_ _ **not**_ _just pay me a compliment._ It took me a minute to catch my breath, but when I did, my protest was automatic. "I'm not that nice."

Valen chuckled. "No. You have a demon's temper and a viper's tongue, that much is true." He gave me another of those careful looks. "But so does Allesha. And you both have kind hearts and generous souls, so I think, on the balance, that the multiverse is better off for having you in it."

A thousand clever retorts rose into my throat, then took wings and fluttered away like gypsy moths, leaving me bereft of anything to say except the truth. "I have no idea how to respond to that."

Valen lifted one shoulder in a shrug, looking away. "Say nothing, if you wish. Call me a knave, if you wish." He cleared his throat. His ears were red. "I simply wanted to say that. In case this is my last opportunity to say it."

I blinked a few times. "Oh." A couple of lonely neurons sparked, like fireflies in a meadow. "Well. Thank you." I cleared my throat. "You're, uh. You're not so bad, yourself." Almost immediately, I wanted to kick myself. _Smooth, Rebecca. Very smooth._ It dawned on me that my fingers were still wrapped around his forearm. I could feel the heat coming off of him, even through the leather, not to mention the corded muscle underneath. It was doing funny things to my head. Or maybe that was just the Elder Brain, and this was my last moment of semi-coherent thought before my brains got turned into soup. Of the two options, I wasn't sure which was worse.

A throat cleared tinnily. "Wielder. May I remind you that you are presently in extreme danger?"

My hand sprang open like a bear trap in reverse. "Right!" I spun to face the floating skull that was Enserric's current form. "You're right. We should keep moving." I vibrated upright, bright with fake cheer and nerves. "Elder Brains wait for no man and all that."

Valen had gone all stiff-shouldered and red-faced. "Of course." His voice was brisk. "Time is wasting. Come. We are almost there." Then he turned without another word and strode off.

I followed, putting my palms to the cheeks as soon as his back was turned, to try to draw some of the heat out of my skin. _What the hell am I doing?_ It was this situation, that was what it was. It was too weird. I had no frame of reference to tell me what to think or how to behave when some ultra-powerful brain-snatcher accidentally grabbed two brains for the price of one, and forced them into a conjoined death-march down memory lane. I also didn't really want to _think_ about what was happening, and I always got a bad case of motor mouth when I got nervous. My only hope was that Enserric would find us a way out before this went too far. There were definitely some things in my head that Valen did _not_ need to see, and some thoughts that did _not_ need to be spoken.

The street twisted, zigged, zagged, and finally spat us out at a square, or maybe it was more of a trapezoid. It was bounded by more buildings that all looked like stacks of boxes on the verge of collapse. Almost all of them, anyway. One corner was occupied by a big cube of black granite. With spikes.

Valen stopped not far from the cube's door and looked up at it, his hands on his hips. "There it is," he announced. His tail swayed gently. I got the impression that he was proud of himself, probably for leading us here and not into one of his memory holes. "The Bottle and Jug."

Enserric tilted. "A lowbrow tavern," he observed. "Naturally. Where else would you find a portal of great arcane power?"

I craned my head back. The cube had crenellations. "That's a bar? It looks like a fortress."

Valen shrugged. "What can I say? Hivers do not like to have their drinking disturbed." He held out one hand in an 'after you' gesture. "Shall we?"

Of course my dream had to include a stop at the local dive bar. I gave in to the inevitable. "All right. Lead on."

The door was huge and made of metal, and there was a metal sign on it, with the letters ' _B &J'_ spelled out in rivets. Next to the door, a sign read, ' _Open from 8 A.P. to 8 B.P_ ', whatever the hell that meant.

We went in.

The interior was dim, in the tradition of dive bars everywhere. The air smelled like roasted onions, burning fat, and stale beer. Soiled red carpets muffled our footsteps. Oil lanterns gave off a mellow yellow light and greasy smoke.

To the left, the main chamber opened up – sort of. It was divided into sections by wooden partitions that were painted in scenes both lewd and violent. There was a long, polished iron bar at the far end of the room, manned by an orc bartender, which made this the first time I'd ever seen an orc in a bowtie. People crowded the tables, including people who looked nothing like people, only they were drinking and dicing and playing cards just like normal people did, so I really had no idea what to think of anything anymore.

Stranger than anything else, though, was the familiarity of it. This place was filthy, sure, and the people were weird, and I was pretty sure that stabbings were a nightly occurrence around here, but for all that it was different, one thing was the same - it had a hectic, cosmopolitan, big city vibe that I knew in my bones. Of all the ways I'd expected Sigil to feel, the last was to find that it felt kind of like home.

Valen led me down the hall, a little apart from the main chamber, which was fine by me. Some of those people in there had _beaks_. But, if I had any hopes of being spared any further weirdness, they were quickly dashed when a _thing_ came bursting through the kitchen's swinging doors and shuffling down the hall.

The thing was carrying a tray full of glasses like it was a waiter, except that this waiter was about three feet tall and looked like somebody had crossed a svirfneblin with a bald rat. Its nose was huge and hooked and veiny and red, its eyes were beady, and its skin was pasty and sagging, hanging on it like it had been meant to garb someone twice the size. In spite of my better judgment, I crowded close to Valen again. The feeling of familiarity vanished. "What is that?" I hissed.

Valen glanced at the thing as if surprised that I'd even thought it was worth mentioning. "A fensir," he explained. "They staff the place. Ugly little biters, but peaceful unless you provoke them, and they brew the best beer in the Hive – or so I am told."

"You never tried?"

Valen's jaw tightened. "No. My temper is uncertain enough as it is, and I have seen what happens to men of uncertain temper when they drink." He avoided my eyes, as if ashamed of the admission. "Best not to risk it."

He was wiser than I was, that was for sure. "Good call."

Valen smiled briefly. "Thank you." He stopped and gestured towards a small, black-iron door, almost invisible against the black granite wall. "The entrance to the back rooms is through here."

I looked. There was a sign above the door. It read ' _lavatries_ '. "Through the bathrooms?"

"Yes."

Well, it wasn't as if this could get any weirder. "All righty, then," I said, and stepped through, Enserric still bobbing along behind me.

The lavatory was a long, tiled room full of buckets. No people were present, but the stench of secondhand beer had a presence all its own. There was a mop in one of the buckets. From the way the soles of my boots stuck to the floor, whatever was in the washbucket had very little to do with water. Valen led the way to a door in the back. I followed, trying not to breathe.

The hall past the door was like back halls everywhere – narrow, dingy, and a lot less interesting than the front of the house. Except for the orc who was guarding the door to the arena, anyway. He was pretty interesting, not only because he was, like the bartender, wearing a bowtie, but also because he was holding a big cudgel with spikes in it. He rose from his stool as we approached. "Oi! You!" he bellowed, and pointed his cudgel at us. "Stop right there!"

I sighed. "Oh, for fuck's sake." I didn't have time for this. I pointed at the orc. Power boiled to the tip of my tongue. "Go to sleep."

The orc glared at me and opened his mouth to deliver some comeback. Then my command hit him, and his eyes glazed over and he slithered to the floor.

Valen knelt and thumbed the orc's eyes open. "Out cold," he reported, and stood, flashing me a grin. "Well done. That is one guard down."

The happy glow that filled me at his approval almost but not quite subsumed the disgust I felt at being so far gone that I was practically wagging my tail and panting for a pat on the head from this man. Maybe even a nice long scratch, to take care of an itch that'd been plaguing me lately. I gave him a tight-lipped smile, since that was the only way to keep myself from beaming. "Thanks."

Valen took in my expression. His own turned a little confused and a lot uncertain. "Ah…you are welcome." He looked up and down the hall, then jerked his head. "This way."

The hall ended in a door. There was a fensir snoring on a stool just outside the door, under a crudely lettered sign that read, ' _Out of Order'_. I exchanged glances with Valen and Enserric, then put my hand on the latch and turned it, slowly and gently, so as not to interrupt the fensir's dreams.

Past the door, the whole place opened up into a huge arena. There were tiers ringed with benches, lamps blazing with light and heat, and in the middle of it was a big, hay-covered pit. To one side, a set of metal stairs led up to a landing, hit the wall, and split, left and right. Left of the landing, a second set of stairs led to an elevated office, with windows overlooking the arena proper. Inside, a man sat at a desk, his head lowered in the way of somebody who was dealing with paperwork he'd really rather not deal with. Right off the landing, more stairs led up to an iron door with iron bands across it, iron chains across the bands, and an enormous padlock stuck through the chains.

Valen jerked his head for me to follow, and together we crept along the edge of the room, our shoulders to the wall. I looked down into the pit. There was a fight in progress. One of the contestants was a woman. It was hard to notice any details about her, because it was her opponent that relentlessly drew the eye. He was as tall as a hill giant, but had one eye, a bald head, and, for some reason, a third arm growing out of his chest.

The cyclops gave his opponent a ringing bitchslap. She flew across the arena and hit the wall with the sound of breaking ribs. The crowd groaned. A few people cheered. The woman was slumped against the wall but struggling to get up when the cyclops took two big strides, raised his foot, and stepped on her.

I clapped a hand over my mouth. "You _fought_ that?" I whisper-shrieked to Valen.

The tiefling climbed the first flight of stairs. He barely glanced backwards. "I _beat_ that."

I wished Valen had forgotten what it sounded like when a cyclops stepped on somebody, because if we got out of this alive and sane, _his_ memory was going to haunt _my_ nightmares. "Okay. How about we try not to fight it again? Just in case our luck doesn't hold."

Valen looked at the mess in the arena and grimaced slightly. "Good idea," he agreed, and led the way around the outside of the ring, where the cyclops was still busy playing with his food.

We climbed. Our footsteps echoed on the metal stair. We made it to the first landing. Valen looked around warily and turned right. I looked, too. The crowd was still focused on the carnage happening down below, and the cyclops was still focused on reducing his would-be killer to a pulp. I swallowed and faced forward. Valen's tail swayed ahead of me as we climbed. He reached the head of the stairs and stopped. "Ah," he said, and stared at the barred and chained door with some consternation. "Now, this will take some thinking."

Enserric floated up to join the tiefling. "Excellent," he said. "Now, if only either of you were suited to such complex tasks as _thinking_ , we might even be in luck."

Valen stopped rattling the chains long enough to glower over his shoulder at the skull. "Do you have any useful ideas to share, or are you merely making sarcastic remarks?"

"As a matter of fact, I do have some ideas," Enserric retorted indignantly. "Were I in my usual form, my wielder might use me to cut through those chains."

"And in your current form?"

Enserric paused, glittering. "Wellll…" he said. "I suppose, under the circumstances, you might be able to use me to bash the lock."

Valen growled under his breath as he tried to jigger the lock. "Tempting. Very tempting."

I looked behind us. Things were wrapping up, people were starting to disperse, and the cyclops was starting to lose interest in his toy, probably because it had stopped moving. "Uh, guys…"

As if he'd heard me, even above the noise of the crowd, the cyclops turned and looked up at us. Its eyes went shiny, black, and hard. The skin of its face squirmed and distorted, like there were tentacles inside it, fighting to get out. "YOU."

We all turned to stare. I spoke first. "Fuck me harder."

Enserric clacked his jaws anxiously. "Wielder, if you have a solution to our present crisis, I would strongly advise implementing it, right about…" The cyclops broke out of the arena and started to climb over the bleachers, crushing a few onlookers as he went. Enserric wailed, "…now!"

I looked at the black-eyed thing wearing the cyclops' skin, then at the door, trying to think. There were bars and chains and there was a lock with a keyhole. There was no way out. Not unless we could fit through a keyhole.

Suddenly, Enserric rose about a foot. "But you can!" He swooped around me. "Think, wielder! Is a passage the size of a keyhole any bar to the wind?"

The cyclops thundered up the stairs. I stared at Enserric. "Shit. You're right," I said, and reached out and grabbed them both – the skull in one hand, and Valen's shoulder in the other. The stairs shuddered. "Hang on, boys," I warned, and thought, with all my might, of fog.

An instant before the cyclops reached the topmost landing, gravity let go of us.

The cyclops' fist swiped through mist. It roared, and a million voices roared with it.

It was a good thing I no longer had a body, even a dream one, because if I had one, I'd have been shitting my pants. _Go!_ I yelled silently, and then I narrowed down to a stream and flowed through the keyhole.

There was a platform on the other side of the door, with five stone arches, placed like the faces of a pentagon. I thought of stone, and my boots struck the floor. Behind me, the door boomed and rattled under the force of furious punches. The portals, if they were portals, were dead, showing nothing on the other side but the other side of this room. "Tell me you know how to open this thing, Valen. Lie to me if you have to."

A cloud spun and then resolved itself into Valen, who was either a quick learner or had been turned into mist before and didn't need to be told how to break the spell now. "Firkin," he gasped, and a sliver of light appeared in one of the portals, then opened wide.

Enserric swiveled in astonishment. " _That_ is the portal key? 'Firkin'? As in, a firkin of beer?"

Valen flushed and scowled. "The portals open with a word, and this is a tavern. What did you expect? A mystical chant?"

I stared at him, then shook my head. "Your city is _weird._ " Metal screamed. The outline of a fist appeared in the door, effectively erasing any reservations I might have had about entering strange portals. I'd already done it once, anyway, and that time hadn't turned out too badly, whereas staying here seemed like a whole barrel full of bad. Maybe even a firkin. "Last one in's a rotten egg!" I called, and jumped through.

White light flared, blinding me. Wind roared, deafening me. Cold struck, numbing me.

Then, like I'd just tumbled out of the far end of a chute, the light and wind and cold all swept out from under me and deposited me into a place of light and music and heat.

And wet. Also wet.

I hit water and went under. My ears made a glong-glong sound, and my mouth filled with the bitter, chemical burn of chlorine. I fought my way to the surface, coughing. "What the…" I gasped, and opened my eyes. Blurry slashes of light resolved themselves into points. Music floated over the water. Voices hummed. I stared. "Oh. Shit."

A whole lot of spluttering and splashing came from my left. It resolved itself into the smoky growl of a tiefling who was starting to get _seriously_ fed up with this bullshit. " _Now_ where are we?"

A black sky, spangled with stars, reflected off the water. I heard the distant sound of traffic, the splash of water, the pulse of music, and when I looked up, all around me I saw looming structures of metal and glass and concrete.

Stunned, I scythed my arms and legs so that I twisted around in the water, and just as I'd feared, or maybe just as I'd hoped, I saw the familiar skyline of the night-time city. The sight hit me like a punch to the heart. "We're home." My voice was weak. "Again."


	49. Summer in the City

_A/N: NEW CHAPPEEEEEEEEEEEEE!_

 _Recommended writing/reading soundtrack:_  
 _Summersong, The Decemberists_  
 _Hey Jude, The Beatles_  
 _Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen_  
 _Summer in the City, Lovin' Spoonful_

* * *

 _Is this the real life  
_ _Is this just fantasy  
_ _Caught in a landslide  
_ _No escape from reality_

\- Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"

~*~  
Chapter 49: Summer in the City  
~*~

It was summer in the city, although you couldn't tell from the pool on the penthouse roof, where there was always a breeze and the water was a perfect seventy-five degrees.

Water lapped against tiny glass mosaic tiles. Bare feet slapped on stone. Glasses clinked. Conversation hummed. Music pulsed. And everywhere, everywhere, there were lights – twinkling in the skyline, sparkling on the water, glowing from inside the glass-and-concrete structure of the penthouse loft.

Sleek chaise lounges were arrayed at the poolside, not so much chairs as they were sculptures. A dove-gray sofa, as sculptural as the lounges, encircled a round glass table. Ghost people crowded them all, lounges and sofa and even the floor, cutting loose in a way that would have made Mother Gothal blush.

A woman in a plunging swimsuit and a fur stole glided past, holding a martini glass. She sidestepped another pair of women who were entwined on one of the lounges with their tongues down each other's throats and hands up each other's miniskirts. The sofa seemed to be the epicenter of activity, probably because that was where the best drugs were. White-gloved waiters moved among it all with full trays of food and drinks, but mostly drinks.

Memories trickled in. "Oh. Shit. _This_ party."

Water splashed. Valen spat. "Gah! This water tastes foul," he complained. He mopped his face, but it didn't do much good, as his hand was dripping. So was his hair. Wet, it was the color of a good Bordeaux. He was still in armor, but mithril was light and this was a shallow pool, meant more for shenanigans than swimming, so as long as he didn't fall over he was probably okay.

After a brief struggle, Valen managed to dash enough water from his eyes to see clearly. His gaze raked his surroundings with its usual brisk _where's-the-enemy-and-how-do-I-kill-them_ alertness, then slowed as he took it all in. His eyes lifted. His jaw sagged. " _This_ is your home?"

I looked up, following his gaze. The sky was dark, or as dark as it ever got in the city. Lights shone all around us. Closer by, they picked out the shapes of individual buildings. The really big skyscrapers loomed a few blocks downtown, great spires of metal and glass, all dressed up in glitter for the evening. This section of Park was a little quieter, though, all brick and marble, renaissance and gothic revival and First Empire and a mish-mash of a hundred other styles, with no buildings more than thirty or forty stories high, max. Further out, the details on the buildings were lost in a sea of lights. Spotlights panned across the sky. The distant span of a bridge was picked out in arcs of light.

I drank in the view. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it until I'd seen it again. My smile was bittersweet, but it turned sweeter when I looked back at Valen. I thought I'd remember the look of wonder on his face for a good, long time. "Welcome to New York." I shrugged. "It's not much, but we like to call it home."

He was waterlogged and his sinuses were probably on fire from getting a snootful of chlorinated water and he was in the process of receiving the mother of all mindfucks, but for now, Valen seemed to have forgotten all that in favor of being flabbergasted by my hometown. "It is so bright," he marveled. "And so _immense_."

"I told you." My tone was mock-chiding. "You didn't believe me."

Valen shook his head. "I did. Truly. But I do not think I fully appreciated your meaning, until now." There were taller buildings than ours, one which loomed just a block away and several stories higher. He leaned back – cautiously – to peer up at it. "How tall is that thing?"

"Forty stories, maybe." I lifted my hand, pointing. Water streamed along my scales, pattering merrily into the pool. "That other one's about thirty. Same as this one."

His tone almost wasn't grudging at all, which meant that in the ongoing battle between The Cage and The Big Apple, the latter had finally scored a solid win. "Impressive. Very impressive." He looked up further, into the clear black sky. "Strange. Does your world have no stars?" He frowned. "There are many layers of the Abyss which do not, but I did not expect to see it here."

"No, there are stars. You just can't see 'em, because, well..." I gestured around us. "Too much light."

Valen's head turned, the lights reflecting in his eyes. "How do these lights work? They are so steady. They cannot be flames, but you said there was no magic in your world, so they cannot be wizard-made, either."

Boy, was he full of questions today. Why was he taking such an interest? _Novelty, I guess._ "They're electricity." A confused flicker of a glance from his baby-blues, like I'd just spoken in a foreign language, gave me the clue that maybe I'd better explain things more simply. "Um. It's like...bottled lightning. Sort of."

The light of comprehension dawned in his eyes, and he laughed softly. "No wonder you have such an affinity for lightning. You grew up surrounded by it."

I'd never thought of it that way. I'd never really thought of it much at all. I just liked thunderstorms – the deafening noise, the blinding light, and the wild, unpredictable energy of them. I shrugged. "Dunno. Could be." I waded laboriously to the edge of the pool. "Come on. You can gawk while we look for a way out."

His sulky reply was nearly drowned out by a whole lot of splashing. "I was not _gawking_."

"Oh, you totally were."

"I was not. I was...admiring."

Any impulse to argue dissolved right then and there. I couldn't help but be flattered. Maybe he wasn't admiring _me_ , but he was admiring my hometown, which was the next best thing. "Well, admire away, but let's do it from dry land." I reached the ladder and tried to hoist myself up. I failed. Water splooshed up all around me, and it was only through sheer dumb luck and a lot of flailing that I kept my grip on the ladder and didn't actually go over backwards. "Okay. This might be harder than I thought."

A wash of water and heat said somebody pretty big and pretty toasty had drawn up close behind me. "I can give you a push," Valen offered.

I frowned at the ladder thoughtfully. It was steel, and slippery. "You sure that's a good idea?"

Water splished against me as he shrugged. "No, but it is worth a try. We are certainly not getting anywhere this way."

I gave in. "All right. On three." I gripped the ladder in both hands and scooted one foot onto the lowest rung. "One, two..."

On three, I hauled, and Valen planted his shoulders against my backside and heaved, and things were going okay until my ankle got twisted in the rungs of the ladder and I let go of the ladder with a yell and fell over backwards.

That would even have been okay, if Valen hadn't been behind me at the time.

 _That_ would even have been okay, if he'd had decent footing, but since he was standing in a very expensive pool on a roof deck in Manhattan in full armor, he didn't. So we both went over. Backwards.

Water fountained – into the air, into my eyes, up my nose. For a brief, exciting few seconds, my world was nothing but a dizzying confusion of splashing and foaming and coughing.

I resurfaced, not so much like a cork as an old boot, sodden and beat-up and only moderately seaworthy. I flailed in a circle, reaching for Valen. I got one hand on something metallic and got another hand on something rather warmer and more yielding, hoped like hell I hadn't accidentally grabbed his ass, and pulled, trying to steady him. "Oh, my god! Are you okay?"

The tiefling burst out of the water like a leviathan breaching the deep, only with more hacking. "Sodding marvelous," he gasped. He went into another fit of coughing, then: "Try to fall harder next time. I think I still have one lung mostly empty of water."

He didn't seem embarrassed, just annoyed, which I supposed meant I hadn't grabbed his ass after all. _Pity._ "Was that sarcasm?"

"No, not at all."

"Right. I totally believe you."

"Was _that_ sarcasm?"

"Nooo, not at all." I tried to wipe my face and only succeeded in splashing it with more water. "Damn it. Some heroes we are. Can't even get out of a pool without heavy machinery." I surveyed the pool balefully. "Come on. There has to be an easier way. Didn't Enserric say we could change things?"

Valen scowled at me. "If you drop a pile of blek in this pool with us, I am leaving you to your fate."

I was very proud of the fact that I didn't even raise my voice at him. "That's not quite what I had in mind."

"Very well, I...wait." Valen narrowed his eyes at me. "What do you mean by 'not _quite_ '?

I had already closed my eyes and started thinking. I pictured deserts, and salt flats, and dry ocean-beds, maybe even with fish still flopping around in the mud, all the water gone…

The heavy sway of water let go of me. I staggered and grabbed at the ladder to steady myself, then, cautiously, peeled my eyes open.

The water was gone, as if it had just swirled down the drain in an instant.

Also, there was a fish on the bottom of the pool. It was flopping. Insofar as I could read any expression on its slimy, fishy face, it looked surprised.

Valen looked down, dripping. "Is that a trout?"

I watched the fish flop. "I think it might be."

"There were no fish in here when we arrived."

The fish was slowing down, possibly from exhaustion, maybe from despair. I could relate. "I don't think there were."

"Did you do that?"

"I think I might have."

"You have a dangerous imagination."

"What's so dangerous about a trout?"

Valen snorted. "Not dangerous to us. Dangerous to the fish." Soggily, he knelt, and scooped the fish up in his hands. It lay across his palms, its mouth opening and closing and its gills flapping futilely. He stared at it in dismay. "Ah, Hells." With a sigh, he placed the fish gently on the tile, and regarded it with resigned pity. "Poor bastard."

I looked at him and smiled. "You're sweet."

Valen shook his head and looked away, reddening. "Hardly." He stood, water streaming out from under his breastplate. "I have just seen enough pointless death in my life. I have no taste for more."

He had a better heart than me. Me, all I could think of was how long it had been since I'd last had some sushi. "Well, looks like we can change _some_ things," I mused, changing the subject. "Good to know."

Valen grunted in acknowledgement. "Small things, at least."

"Better than nothing."

Valen put his head to one side. "True." He sloshed to the pool's edge, placed both hands on the tile border, and heaved himself up and out, not even bothering with the ladder. Water poured out of his armor, freed by the sudden movement. His tail lashed, spraying more water from side-to-side, and when he took a step forward, his armor showered more. He scowled. "I _hate_ swimming."

I'd never seen a waterlogged tiefling before. It was an endearingly pathetic sight – his hair hanging sodden, his chin dripping, his armor leaking, his leathers soggy and an air of towering indignation rising off of him along with a faint haze of steam. He also had a lock of bordeaux-colored hair plastered rather fetchingly to one white cheek. I lifted my hand to cover a smile. "I thought you wanted to see the ocean."

"I said I wanted to see it. I did not say I wanted to be _in_ it."

"That makes no sense."

Valen glowered at me uncertainly. "I am a tiefling. Not making sense is in my blood."

I heaved myself out of the pool. _I_ used the ladder, and even then it wasn't easy. "Excuses, excuses."

"It is the truth." Valen slicked water from his leathers with the edge of his hand and looked around, coloring a little as he took in the goings-on. "Strange. This does not seem like a dangerous place." He eyed the cavorting partygoers scornfully. "These people look as if they have never seen battle. Why would the Elder Brain send you – send _us_ \- here?"

 _Because there are lots of things here I wouldn't want you to see, and the Elder Brain knows it and wants me to suffer –_ I thought. "Dunno," I said. I scouted for the least-embarrassing route indoors, where, if memory serves, things would be a little more sedate. We just had to make absolutely sure not to go upstairs, that was all. "Come on. Let's check this place out."

Valen frowned at me, then shrugged. "Very well." He looked around, his eyes bright and his tail flicking like a cat's. Then he headed for the roof's edge. "Over here," he called. "I would like to get the lay of the land."

 _Now that's a lie._ And a transparent one, too. Valen didn't want to get the lay of the land. He wanted to see my city. Sightseeing wasn't quite what I'd had in mind, but at least this way he wasn't watching the party, and if we were stuck in the moment between one thought and the next, I supposed we could spare a minute more to indulge his curiosity. I trudged after Valen, dripping and pensive and tense.

Valen crossed to the edge of the roof, where a hip-high fence of steel wire and glass was all that kept him from a sudden, terminal meeting with the pavement, forty stories down. He put both hands on the edge of the rail and leaned out, looking down. He let out a low whistle. "That is quite a drop."

"Yeah." I stepped up to the rail, leaned my forearms on the fence, and looked down over Park Avenue. The wind ruffled my hair, calming me. "I like it, though. Seeing things from up high, I mean. Gives you a different perspective."

Valen hmm'ed agreement. "It does, though one seldom finds such a lofty perch in Sigil." He looked out on the night city. The tension that was always in his face had eased into an almost wistful expression. "It is a beautiful sight, even in the dark."

My eyes traced the lines of his face. I couldn't help myself, not even under these circumstances. "Yeah."

Valen leaned forward, blessedly oblivious to my scrutiny. "What does this place look like, in daylight?"

I lowered my eyes and picked at my fingernails. "Dirtier. Messier. Louder." I thought back. "And hot enough to boil an egg on the sidewalk, in the summer, but so cold and windy in the winter that it feels like you could get cut in half just walking down the street."

Valen nodded thoughtfully. "Not so unlike Sigil, then. Although Sigil does not have seasons."

"So what does it have?"

Valen chuckled. "Moods."

I smiled. "That's every city."

"I suppose so, although the cities in the Abyss only have one mood, and that is generally malevolent."

My jaw dropped and my head tilted slowly as I took in this new information. "Wait. There are _cities_ in the Abyss?"

Valen gave me an amused look. "Of course. Cities, fortresses, outposts…they are all scattered throughout the infinite layers of the Abyss, as well as most of the rest of the Planes."

I'd pictured the Abyss as a huge red plain, like the surface of Mars, only with more blood and screaming. "That's insane. Who would live in the Abyss?"

Valen shrugged. "Fiends, powers, beings from stranger dimensions, the souls of mortals whose sins in life cursed them to an eternity in the Abyss." His face got grimmer. "Even tieflings – those, at least, who have chosen to embrace their demonic heritage."

I tried, and failed, to wrap my head around the idea of a city where demons and ghosts and wacky interdimensional beings walked the streets like normal people. "You've _been_ in these cities?"

Valen grimaced. "Yes. To my detriment." His face went distant and a little blank, in the way it did when he was remembering that stuff. "The Abyss is a place of chaos and fear and anger and hatred. Its cities and their denizens are fully as foul as you might expect." Some expression came back to his face, not so much a smile as an easing of tightness. "I think I prefer your city by far."

"Oh." I smiled and looked down and ahem'ed. "Well, in that case, I'm glad I could bring you here." My smile faded. "Even if the circumstances aren't the greatest."

Valen turned to regard me, seeming to come back from whatever distant and unhappy place he'd gone to. His smile was barely there, but brought a gentle light to his eyes. "I feel the same."

I felt strange – light-headed and dizzy, like I was falling. I hoped it wasn't a sign that, back in my body, my brains were getting sucked out through my nose. My hands tightened on the railing. The wind murmured reassuringly in my ears. My white-knuckled grip eased. Slightly. "We…" I cleared my throat. "We should keep moving." I could hear a faint buzzing. "Enserric must be here somewhere. I can hear him yelling at me."

Valen nodded. He took one last, lingering look at the city lights, then turned his attention to me. "Very well." He gestured for me to walk ahead of him. "Lead on. I shall follow."

I did.

We crossed the roof, or tried to, except my ghosts all wanted to come and say hi.

A few steps in, one of the ghosts solidified and snagged me around the waist with one arm. He was blond with puppydog eyes, a swimmer's build, and a naughty grin. "Hey, Becca," he said breathlessly. "Just the woman I was looking for."

I blinked up at the guy in owlish astonishment. "Hey, uh…" Neurons fizzled. "…you."

The guy's eyes roamed. "Yeah, me." He smiled encouragingly. "Don't you remember? That weekend in Saint Tropez?" His hand roamed, too. "Those sweet tropical nights…you remember those, don't you?"

I tried to think of a way to extricate myself that didn't involve turning into mist or kicking this guy in the funbags. "Can't say that I do, no." I was aware of a shape looming off to the side, and while I couldn't see the details without taking my eyes off this guy, I had an impression of horns, red hair, and a temper on the simmer. I raised my voice. "I've got it, Valen." I turned my attention back to the guy and made my impression as unfriendly as I could possibly make it while bent over backwards like I was Ginger to this guy's Fred. "I'm not interested. Scram." The guy vanished. I hadn't been counting on that, especially as he'd been holding me up. Bereft of support, I toppled over backwards. "Shi-" Strong hands caught me, one by the elbow and one by the hip, before I hit the ground. "-oh. Thanks."

Valen set me back on my feet. "You are welcome. Who was that?"

 _Notch number three hundred and seventy-two on the bedpost, more than likely._ "I have no idea." It was a miracle this memory was as clear as it was. I'd killed a lot of brain cells that night. Straightening my clothes and trying to recover some small scrap of dignity, I turned. My feet froze to the patio in shock. There was a guy approaching – slim, dark-haired, with playboy good looks that drove the girls wild, though they'd never done much for me. I knew too much about what went on in that pretty head. "Oh, hey, Jeff."

Jeff had a tumbler in one hand and the other arm around a chick with short blue hair and lots of tattoos. The girl eyed me, took her cigarette from her lips, and blew an idle stream of smoke as Jeff slipped his other arm around my shoulders in casual affection. His tumbler clinked. I got a whiff of good scotch. "Hey, Becca." He gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek. "Having fun? Can I get you anything?"

Seeing him hurt more than I'd expected it to. I'd known Jeff since college and thought he'd been a friend, or at least a partner in crime. Then he'd turned out not to be such a good friend after all, although maybe it hadn't been fair of me to expect more from him. I'd been going down in flames at the time, and what kind of friend would I have been to take him down with me? "Not…really, no," I managed.

Jeff laughed it off. "You're not gonna make me take out the good stuff, are you?" he teased. "Wait, what am I saying? Of course you will."

There was a glass table in front of the sofa, with lines of white powder on the glass. I stared at them. "No," I said slowly, and stepped back. "That's all right. Thanks."

Memories trickled back.

 _I remember._ I'd come over here, done a few lines, met some nice people, and one thing had led to another, and it had been fun, as far as I remembered, and the next day I woke up and showered and put my clothes back on and drank black coffee and ate one of Jeff's patented hangover omelets and called my ride home and I'd thought no more of it until a couple weeks later, when my stepmother came into the sunroom and hurled a manila envelope in my face.

It hadn't taken me long to figure out why Lois was so mad – just long enough to pop the DVD in the player and let the first thirty seconds unspool. Those had been some of the longest thirty seconds of my life.

Dad had refused to pay them – said it was 'stooping to their level' – and as a result, within a couple of days, that video had started popping up _everywhere_ , and I stopped leaving the house for a while. Blumenthals were almost immune to shame, but not entirely, especially when I heard some of the things people were calling me.

My father's first heart attack had come a month after the video was published. Lois had told me it was my fault. Screamed it at me, actually, right in the middle of the hospital parking lot. I'd replied that she was full of shit, to which _she'd_ replied that I was a narcissistic asshole who destroyed everything I touched, to which _I'd_ replied that I didn't see why she was so worked up anyway seeing as how if he died she'd get what she'd always wanted from him in the first place, i.e. a big pile of money, and thus had begun our years-long war, because some words cut so deep that the bleeding never stopped even after their echoes had long since faded.

I looked around. It had all started here. Not all of it – some things had been built into me since the day I was born, fault lines that would eventually become cracks and swallow me – but the real downhill slide had started here.

As if drawn on a string, my eyes rose to the second story of the penthouse. Like the rest of the apartment, the walls were floor-to-ceiling glass. There was movement in one of the upper rooms – a ghost of me, pressed up against the glass. I wasn't alone. I was also very naked. I watched briefly, then jerked my eyes away before Valen saw me watching and decided to see what had caught my attention. He couldn't see that. Bad enough he was seeing this much. Any more, and I'd never be able to look him in the eye again.

My skin crawled. _So this is its next trick._ The Elder Brain couldn't spook me, so it was going to humiliate me. For a brain in a vat, it was a hell of a voyeur, not to mention a sadist.

I bit my lip, then I planted a foot on the table and shoved it over. It made a godawful sound. Tile cracked. So did glass. White powder spilled everywhere.

Jeff jumped back, spilling his drink. "Hey! Watch it! Do you have any idea how much money you just-"

I cut him off. "Sorry about this, Jeff, but…" I pictured him gone. It wasn't hard. He'd been gone from my life for a while. "Seeya." He vanished. I breathed out, then pointed at the white powder strewn all over the patio. "Don't inhale that," I told Valen.

Valen looked at the mess, but at least he was looking down, not up. "I see."

His tone was neutral, but it made me bristle anyway. I hadn't wanted him to see this. I didn't care what anyone thought of me. This was all his fault, for making me care about what he thought of me. I spun. "You got a problem with this?" I demanded.

Valen's tail went still in surprise and his eyes got big, but to my own surprise, rather than losing his temper at my tone, he held up his hands as if to mollify me. "No." His voice was very careful. "Why should I?"

I laughed without humor. "Really? 'Cause most people do." I hadn't wanted him to see this, but he'd seen it, and now I just wanted to yank the blade out and get the pain over with. I flung out a hand, taking in the empty deck and the detritus of debauchery. "Parties like this were how I spent most of my time, when I was younger." I laughed again. "My stepmother once told me my father didn't die of a heart attack, he died of shame. I can't say that she was wrong." It had always enraged me, how behavior that had earned Jeff pats on the back had gotten _me_ called a whore, but that was society for you. In hindsight, though, while there was nothing wrong in having a little fun with a like-minded guy or three, back then my reasons for doing it hadn't been so much about fun as they'd been about escape – from a lot of things, but mostly from myself.

Valen was watching me the way a soldier might watch a live grenade. "Rebecca…" He paused, then spoke with utmost delicacy. "Peace. Your past is your own business, and I do not judge you for it. How could I?" He grimaced. "I know that I have done many things in my life that I wish I had not done. I am no stranger to regrets, believe me."

I stood, breathing heavily, not looking at him. I couldn't decide whether his sympathy made me more or less enraged. On the one hand, I didn't need his sympathy. On the other, maybe I kind of did. One thing was sure, though – I'd just made an ass of myself, and I didn't know how to fix it.

Valen was quiet for a moment. Then he sighed. Then he spoke. "Rebecca."

I looked straight ahead and wished it didn't feel so good to hear him say my name. "What?"

"Do not get too enmeshed in what you see here." He stepped closer, not touching. "You are not truly here. You are in Zorvak'mur, caught in a waking dream. If you accept this as real, if you allow it to get under your skin, you have already lost."

My jaw tightened. "I know. You're right." I ran a hand through my hair and blew out a frustrated breath. "It's just…"

He didn't need me to finish the sentence. "I know," he said softly. "Believe me, there are many, many things I wish I could change about my past." His voice firmed. "But it is the past, and beyond changing."

I laughed bitterly. "How about the future?"

"The future is out of your hands, and so is the past. Focus on the present. It is the only thing you can control."

I knew in my head that he was right, but it wasn't my head that needed convincing. Old guilt and humiliation clawed its way out of the pit of my stomach, along with a sickening, filthy feeling, as if I'd been swimming in raw sewage. This thing had gotten way too far in my head. I gritted my teeth. "This is ridiculous." We had to find a way out. Deekin was counting on us, him and all the others. I listened for the telltale buzz of Enserric's voice. I could hear it, but it was fainter this time. "You said we should focus. Let's focus." We could address all this, including my little breakdown, later. "Come on. I can almost hear Enserric. Maybe if we move around, he'll get louder." I led the way through the glass doors and into the apartment.

Inside, everything was pale wood and metal and glass in lines so clean they looked like they could cut, and the furniture was as minimal in design as it was maximal in price. Valen absorbed it all without much more than a murmured, "Quite a kip."

I shrugged and led Valen down the hall, stepping over a couple who'd chosen to have a make-out session on the fur rug in front of Jeff's fake fireplace. The buzzing got louder. So did the music, something with a beat but not much else. "Jeff's family owned the biggest law firm in the city," I explained as we walked. "Plus a lot of real estate. Foreclosures, mostly. It's amazing what you can get your hands on when you know all the legal loopholes."

"Yes." Valen's voice was flat. "I know their kind."

I thought of where he'd grown up and winced. "Sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have brought that up-"

Valen waved my apology away. "Do not be sorry. Just do not expect me to approve of people who profit from other people's misery."

"I don't expect you to approve of anything." It was a fight and a half to keep my voice mild. "I was just saying-"

Valen got a dismayed look on his face and hastened to interrupt, "I am not accusing _you_ of being that way-"

"I didn't say you were." This felt like we were dancing, only it wasn't anything as graceful as a waltz. It was more like an awkward tapdance, the two of us circling around each other and desperately trying not to step on any toes. "But if you were-"

"-which I am not-"

"-fine, okay, but if you were, it'd be fair-"

"-no, it would not." Valen was scowling, and I couldn't tell whether he was offended on his behalf or mine. "You are not like th-."

"I used to be." I fiddled with my sleeve. "But now I try not to be."

The tiefling shot me a quick smile. It had the air of a peace offering. "I think you do more than try."

I shrugged, my cheeks burning. "Thanks, but really, it's okay. I know my family's hurt people, and so have I." I opened the bathroom door, saw two ghost-guys playing hide-the-salami in Jeff's steam shower, and closed the door before Valen saw anything. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, his eyes never left me. "You don't have to sugar-coat it," I added. "I'm a big girl. I can take it."

Valen gave me a long look. "Have you ever known me to sugar-coat anything?"

I had to laugh at that. "No, actually. Usually it's the exact opposite."

"Then that should tell you something, should it not?"

A lock of hair bounced as I blew out an exasperated breath. "Valen, are you arguing with me again?"

"No, _you_ are arguing with _me_."

I groaned. "Fuck it. I give up."

A smile threatened to break over his face. "Does this mean I have finally won an argument with you?"

"Yeah, but don't let it go to your head." I caught a glimpse of a smirk. "You're letting it go to your head, aren't you?"

Valen laughed softly. "Perhaps a little."

"Hah. I knew it." I hung a right and stepped into the living room, where a sleek black sound system and several bookcases full of vinyl took up most of one wall. A flat-panel television took up most of the other wall, and pair of speakers like war machines took up a significant amount of floor space, while a subwoofer pounded and jittered to the beat. "Oh. This is where the music was coming from."

Valen stopped and stared at the array of technology, with all of its black plastic and blinky lights. "What _is_ all this?" He winced. "And what is that terrible noise?"

I grinned. "You don't like techno, huh? That's okay. Maybe I can find something else for you." I looked around. There was a turntable hooked up to the system. I stepped up to the nearest bookcase, pursed my lips, ran my finger along a line of record sleeves, and slipped one off the shelf. I smiled at the name. This song had always cheered me up. "Nice. Live at Madison Square Garden. You should like this. I know I do." I swapped one glossy black disc out for another. "All right, Paul. Let's hear it." I lowered the needle. Piano chords filled the room. I sighed. "Oh. I missed you."

Valen stood motionless, his head cocked, as the familiar refrain sang, sweet as honey. "This is…"

Paul's voice floated from the speakers. ' _Any time you feel the pain/Hey Jude, refrain/don't carry the world upon your shoulders_.' I smiled. "Beautiful?" I supplied.

Valen listened. His tail had gone still. "Very."

A knot in my chest unwound. "Glad you like it." I listened to Paul, urging me to take a sad song and make it better, and decided to take his advice, starting with finding my way out of here. There was still a buzzing in my ears, louder than ever, but touching my own power didn't resolve it. I looked around. There was a remote on the shelf. I picked it up and hit the 'power' button.

A blip of light stretched across the television screen, shrank into a dot, and exploded into an image.

The screen showed a spare, trim man with longish black hair, going gray at the temples. He was standing in front of a weather map. He had graphite-colored eyes, a graphite-colored suit, and was glaring at me like I'd run over his mother and fucked his dog. Without breaking eye contact, he flung a hand at the map behind him. "As you can see, the weather tomorrow will be cloudy, with a slight chance of brain liquification – _if you don't bloody get a move on_."

I squinted at the weapon-slash-weatherman. "Hey, Enserric. Nice suit."

On the television screen, Enserric started and looked down at himself and smoothed his tie with the flat of his hand. The tie was a shade of purple that shouldn't have worked but did, in the same way that none of Xanos's fashion choices should have worked, but did. "Why, thank you, wielder." Enserric preened. "But then, a wizard always knows how to dress."

"You're not a wizard, though. Not anymore."

"Thank you for pointing that out. Had you not been so kind as to remind me, I might have forgotten my own death."

"You're welcome, buddy."

"I was being sarcastic."

"So was I."

Valen was staring at the T.V., clearly only half-listening to our bickering. "What _is_ that thing?"

"It's a television." I tried to come up with an explanation. It wasn't easy. I'd always taken this stuff for granted. I didn't know how to explain it to someone who'd never seen it before. "It's, um. Like the radio, except that it sends pictures along with the sound."

Valen stepped a little closer to the television. "It is like a scrying device, but without the magic." His fingers brushed the plastic frame. "Or is it magical? I cannot even tell. If this is a mechanical thing, it is unlike any other machine I have ever seen."

I shrugged. "I don't know. It's just technology. I don't know how it works. I just use it."

Valen's tail curled in a pensive question-mark. "You treat such wonders so casually. Do many people in your world have access to such things, or are they only for the wealthy?"

"Nah. Most people have 'em." I thought about it. "Though not all of them are as big and fancy as this one, I'll grant you."

Valen studied the television a moment longer, then lowered his hand and shook his head. "Your world is a strange place, if such devices are so commonplace."

I didn't think it was strange, but then, I'd grown up with it, whereas he'd grown up in a city which treated the laws of physics as mere suggestions, so maybe it wasn't so much a matter of normal or abnormal so much as it was just a matter of what you were used to. "I suppose so."

"A-hem." Enserric lifted his arm and tapped his wrist with a forefinger. "Tick-tock, wielder."

I rolled my eyes. "All right," I conceded. "Where's the exit?"

Enserric pointed. "Go into the kitchen, through the service door, and into the elevator." He nodded towards the floor. "The way out is all the way down. More than that, I cannot sense until we are closer."

Valen frowned. "I was hoping you would be of more help than that."

"I am, if you count the years I have spent trapped in a sword, not yet a century old, and only one mind, whereas we are up against an ancient and malevolent psychic force with the memories of thousands at its disposal." Enserric scowled. The screen flickered. "You will excuse me if I cannot immediately defeat its wiles."

He had a point. "All right. Elevator it is." I hustled Valen towards the kitchen, noticing as I did so a certain drag in his feet and a longing glance over his shoulder, aimed at the vinyl that was still turning. _Whaddya know. He likes the Beatles._ I grinned to myself and hustled a little more slowly. Deekin was waiting, but if all of this was happening as fast as a thought, then maybe I could let Valen listen to another verse or two.

There was a polished metal door at the end of the galley kitchen – two narrow rectangles with a vertical seam in the middle. There was a down-arrow button next to it. I pushed the button. It lit. I stood back.

Valen watched the whole thing warily. "What now?"

"We wait." I gestured at the elevator door. "It's got a lot of floors to cover."

We waited. Eventually, the elevator dinged. The doors opened. I slipped through them before they'd finished opening, waited just long enough for Valen to follow, paused briefly to reflect on the fact that I was standing in a penthouse elevator with a fully armed and armored tiefling, shrugged, and stabbed the '1' button with my thumb.

Hydraulics hissed. The doors closed. The floor jerked. So did Valen. "Hellfire!" He grabbed for the wall, me, and the door, indiscriminately, temporarily appearing to have three hands instead of just the two. "What was that?!"

I winced. "Sorry. Maybe I should have warned you."

Valen's fingers snapped open, relinquishing my sleeve. "Yes," he managed. He wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his flail, instead. He seemed to feel the need to hold on to something, preferably something that wasn't moving. "Maybe you should have."

It dawned on me that maybe he was unsettled about this situation, too. That was a hard concept to wrap my head around. I'd have thought stereos and elevators would be no biggie, compared to the Abyss, but maybe we were just back to that idea that normal wasn't really any one thing - it was just what you were used to. So, for Valen, multi-headed hell-beasts which could dismember a man in seconds were something he could face without getting too fussed, but being stuck in a moving metal box wasn't. "Sorry. I'll try to warn you next time." The elevator slowed. "Um. Speaking of which, we're about to stop."

Valen nodded and braced himself, which might have been overkill, as the elevator stopped with only the slightest of jerks.

The doors parted. We stepped out. I ran into a waiter.

Stemware clinked and wobbled, but the waiter was fast on his feet and used to tipsy society ladies walking into him, so he managed to step back and whisk his tray away with no lasting damage. He recovered with aplomb and gave me a short bow. "I beg your pardon, Miss Blumenthal," he said, straight-faced. "I didn't see you there." He offered me a flute from his tray. "Champagne?"

I stared. We were in a ballroom. People in unfathomably expensive clothes milled around on an unfathomly expensive floor beneath unfathomably expensive chandeliers, drinking unfathomably expensive champagne and making unfathomably pointless small talk. White-gloved waiters were circling with trays of nibbles and drinks, and tables were being laid for dinner with unfathomably expensive silverware.

I shifted my stare to the waiter. I recognized him. He'd been one of ours. I recognized the building, too. It had been one of dad's. After a moment, I shrugged, took the glass, tossed it back in one practiced gulp, and replaced it onto the waiter's tray with a firm _plink_. The staff always did know how to mollify me. I flashed him a grin. "Thanks, Dave." He winked and nodded and pirouetted away to serve somebody else. I turned, my smile sliding from my face as soon as nobody could see it. "Valen? Where are…" I sighted him lurking by the potted fern next to the elevator. My shoulders sagged with relief. "Oh. There you are." He was staring at me. My shoulders tensed again. "You okay?"

Valen's eyes took me in. "You...changed."

I looked down at myself. "Whoops. You're right. I did." No wonder I was suddenly feeling so confined. I'd ended up in a slinky off-the-shoulder number in white silk and sheer but heavily embroidered gold tulle. I touched my hair. It had been tamed and trussed-up into a formal 'do. There was jewelry, too, a gold-and-pearl demi-parure, and an evening clutch in my right hand, and of course now Valen was looking at me like I was a total stranger. "Hey." I held out my hands and smiled reassuringly. "It's still me."

There was a strange look on Valen's face – a slightly self-derisive twist to his lips and a kind of helpless hopelessness in his eyes. "I know."

My throat convulsed as I swallowed. I didn't like that look on his face. It was the look of a man who was convinced the woman in front of him was out of his league. _Babe, I am_ _ **so**_ _in your league, you have no idea._ But this wasn't the time or place to have that talk, even if I wanted to, which I didn't, so all I did was raise my eyebrows and put my hands on my hips and say, "I'm not gonna have to dump shit all over the floor again, am I?"

That got a hint of a smile out of him. "That would ruin your dress." His smile faltered. "My lady."

I glared down at my gold-spangled clutch, snorted, and threw it over my shoulder. Glass tinkled. Cutlery crashed. Somebody shouted. I ignored them. "Screw the dress." I glared at the high society hellscape around me. "Screw all of this. Enserric! Where are you?"

Somewhere nearby, a phone trilled. A few moments later, a white-gloved waiter approached and held out a small black cell, his face professionally blank. "Call for you, ma'am."

I frowned at him and took the phone. My earrings jangled against it as I cradled it to my ear. "Uh. Hello?"

Enserric's voice drawled over the line. "You called, wielder?"

I had to laugh. "You're getting good at this technology thing."

"I was always a quick study."

"I'll say." I lowered the phone, put it on speaker, and spoke to Valen. "I've got Enserric on the line. Say hi to Valen, Enserric."

The phone sighed. "If I must. Hello, Valen."

Valen stared at the phone, then shrugged. "What the Hells," he said, in the tone of a man who'd given up trying to make sense with anything and decided to just go with the flow. "Hello, Enserric. Where to next?"

An 'EXIT' sign appeared above the emergency exit. "That way. Though be careful. No doubt the Elder Brain will try to intercept you."

I glowered at the crowd. "On it." I gathered my skirt in one hand and swept away, my heels clicking on the parquet floor. "Let's go." I eyed Valen sidelong. He was prowling beside me with the distinctly ill-at-ease expression of a size ten man wearing a size five jock strap. "You okay?"

He paused by a table, picked up a fork, frowned at it, put it down, and picked up another fork. "How many forks do you _need_?" he complained.

This was just what we needed right now – a discussion on table etiquette. "None, but some people like to have options."

Valen's face was a picture, and it was the one right next to 'grumpy' in the dictionary. "Options. Hah." He surveyed the laden tables grimly. "Somewhere, some poor sod is thanking the mazes he's lucked on a crust of stale bread and a bowl of rat-tail soup, and these berks want _options."_

I sighed. _Not again._ "Something tells me this isn't just about forks."

Valen grimaced and ducked his head and touched one of his horns. "I feel…out of place." His shoulders were visibly rigid, even under all the metal. "Not to mention woefully underdressed."

His confidence on the battlefield obviously didn't extend to the ballroom floor. "You kidding?" I asked, keeping my voice light-hearted and mild. "You could wear a potato sack and still outclass ninety-eight percent of the people here." I caught sight of a woman approaching and groaned. "Make that ninety-nine."

The woman was impeccably blonde and had that fixed expression of slight surprise that was characteristic of too much plastic surgery. She held out her berringed hands as she approached, her face creasing in a warm smile that didn't reach her eyes, although maybe that was just the Botox. "Rebecca," she cooed, squeezing my free hand in both of hers and air-kissing my cheek. "How _are_ you?"

I beamed and air-kissed her cheek in return. "Martha! I'm fantastic, just wonderful." Automatically, my accent shifted into the well-bred tones of my youth. "And how are _you_ , darling? Still banging the pool boy?"

Martha's perfectly-shaped eyebrow leapt upwards. "Not at all – although he does send his regards." She simpered. "And you? I heard about that… _debacle_ at Jeffrey's. I assume, of course, that the rumors are baseless?"

 _Ouch._ Martha had been one of Lois's friends, and even in my dreams, it seemed I couldn't catch a break with either of them. Then again, why did I even care? This was only a memory – a little slice of unreality conjured specifically to piss me off. "Nope!" I said cheerfully. "They're all true." I leaned forward and lowered my voice. "And boy, were they fun – more fun than you'll ever have, you old stick-in-the-mud."

Martha's eyes bulged. "How-"

I spoke before she could get any further. "Sorry, Martha. Gotta run. Folks to kill, boys to bang, wars to win...you know how it is." I patted her cheek and sidestepped her with an airy wave. "Ciao!"

Valen stuck to my side, a scowl plastered to his face. "Which fork do I kill myself with if I ever find myself at a table with these people?"

I thought about it. "Definitely the meat fork," I decided. That got a real laugh out of him, gusty and sudden as a gale.

A cultured bray interrupted us. "Rebecca, my darling!" a man called. "Looking as lovely as ever."

I gritted my teeth. "Get your fork ready, Valen." He went poker-faced, and I pasted a smile on my face before turning around. A man with salt-and-pepper hair and a perfect smile was already reaching for my hand. I let him take it. "Why, thank you, Jonathan!" I trilled. "You're looking pretty dapper yourself." I leaned forward and spoke conspiratorially. "Seems that shifting your production to sweatshops agrees with you."

The man withdrew. "Why, you-"

I laughed. Just because this was a dream didn't mean I wasn't going to take the chance to say the things I'd always wanted to say to these people. "Oh, come off it. We all know where your money comes from." I grinned like a shark. "Hey, I have an idea. Why don't you take the money you were going to donate to some big-name charity today and give your workers a raise instead? No? Well, suit yourself." I leaned forward again and whispered. "But don't be surprised if, one of these days, they decide to mount a little rebellion. Maybe I'll even help them out. Arm them. That sort of thing." I swooped in and kissed his cheek before he could dodge, then swept away with another wave and another, 'Ciao!'

Valen allowed me to drag him towards the door. "Are your people truly so cruel?"

I sighed. "No. Not really." I waved a hand at my former peers. "There are decent people here, don't get me wrong, and I doubt anyone here would ever dream of hurting anybody _personally,_ but…" I trailed off.

Valen finished for me. "They do a great deal of damage impersonally?"

"Yes." I smiled humorlessly. "And so did I, by the way."

Valen gave me a speculative glance. "Why?"

"Because that was how it worked." We were almost to the exit. "Because it was expected of me."

"By who?"

Another voice answered for me – sort of. It was cultured, amused, and affectionate. "You're making everybody angry, little peach."

I stopped dead. I didn't turn around. I couldn't turn around. My voice went dead. "Daddy."

Dad's voice neared. "Now, I don't disapprove on principle, but don't you think you should be a little more…targeted in your approach?" He laid his palm on my back. "Come on. Let's make our rounds, then you can change and we can go get a burger, how about that?"

Dad would never have let me skip out of a social obligation like that, much less encouraged it. My head spun with confusion. Valen was watching me. I met his blue eyes and felt my confusion ebb. _This isn't real. Valen was never here. He's the only thing that's real. The rest is a lie._ "No." My voice was steady. "I don't think I'm going to do that."

His voice took on an oh-so-familiar note of concern. "Why not? What's wrong?"

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and made myself turn around. A face I'd last seen occupying a coffin smiled back at me, and a long-patched-over crack opened in my heart. Only this wasn't him. The eyes were wrong. They were cold, where my father's eyes had always been warm. "It's you, isn't it?"

My father gave me a puzzled smile. "Of course. Who else would I be?"

I laughed in the thing's face. "No. You're not my father." My voice was tight and shaking, like a high wire in a storm. "You're that asshole-in-a-vat. You just took my father's face to hurt me." How dare it? Of all the faces it could have stolen, to steal this one, to pollute this memory…I sucked in a sharp breath. "Get out. Get out of my head, or I swear to Shaundakul..."

Dad's eyes went black. "Or what, thrall?" He smiled, and his smile was nothing like my father's. Dad's smile could light a room. This one darkened it. "We think you fail to recognize your predicament. You are ours. The more you resist, the worse this will be for you. Give in. Spare yourself further pain."

Valen's voice cut in, a taut growl of suppressed rage. "If you think either of us will give in so easily, you are not so all-knowing as you think, mindhacker."

The flayer in my father's flesh reached out and gripped my arm. Its fingers made the bones in my wrist grind together, and it smiled at the look on my face. "You cannot do harm to me while I wear this face."

I heard a chain rattle, and smiled. "No," I said dreamily, as a blur in bright mithril and dark leather came up on my right. "But Valen can." Then a whole lot of angry tiefling cannonballed my fake father and knocked him straight into a floral display.

Valen stopped on a dime, checked that his opponent was down, spun, crossed to me in one quick stride, grabbed me by the shoulders, and gave me a once-over. "Are you hurt?"

 _Not physically._ Viciously, I shoved everything I was feeling into a box in my head, locked the box, and buried it deep. "I'll be fine." I looked over Valen's shoulder. A skinny thing with tentacles for a face was rising from the wreckage, shedding bruised petals as it stood. I grabbed the tiefling's hand. "Run." I hobbled a few steps, then stopped. "No, wait, hold on." I stooped, shucked my shoes off, and plunked them down on the nearest hor d'oeuvres tray. "Thanks," I told the waiter, who nodded, straight-faced, and ferried the platter away without further ado. I grabbed Valen's hand again. "Okay. _Now_ run."

The crowd melted away in front of us. We reached the exit and slammed through the door into a cool, dim place.

I skidded to a stop, blinking to make my eyes adjust. Gradually, images bled into focus. I saw tiled floors, curved tile walls, a tiled ceiling, a ticket counter, and a line of turnstiles. "You have got to be kidding me," I groaned.

Valen had his flail in hand, and from his posture, he wasn't planning to put it away any time soon. His eyes tried to pierce every shadow at once. "Where are we?"

"We're in the subway." I padded forward gingerly, wishing I had kept my shoes on. "Ugh. This thing really is trying to torture us."

Valen stiffened, going on high alert. "What is it?"

I really should have known better than to make him nervous. "Nothing. I'm just doing something nobody in their right mind should ever do - walking barefoot in the subway." I grimaced and skirted a suspicious-looking puddle. "God only knows what I'm stepping in right now."

Valen eyed the subway. "It _is_ disgusting, I will grant you that." His head swiveled. "This place reminds me of the Hive – and the other places were all so clean. Are we still in the same city?"

"Under it, yeah."

" _Under_?" Valen echoed, mystified. He frowned. "We are in…your city's Undercity, is that it?"

I shrugged. "I guess you could call it that."

Valen watched a cockroach scuttle up the wall. "I thought your world was rich."

"No." My voice was curt. "I was rich. My world's all kinds of things, including places not so different from the Hive."

"I see." He turned a little, taking in the less-than-glamorous sights. His face was thoughtful. "Strange, how it is so different and yet..."

"So much the same? Yeah. I know. I felt the same way about Sigil."

Valen returned his gaze to me, and smiled. "Perhaps we are not so different, after all."

I felt my face get warm. "I...no. I guess we aren't." But I didn't want to think about that, because there were some thoughts too dangerous to think. I looked around, hunting for a way out. It presented itself in the form of an 'EXIT' sign, hovering above the turnstiles. "A-ha!" I headed for the sign. "Got it," I told Valen. "This way." We started for the turnstiles, Valen hot on my heels.

Near the counter, a door opened and shut. "You!" shouted a bureaucratic kind of voice. "Wait! You need tickets!"

I didn't even bother to look, just waved a hand in the general direction of the attendant. I was pretty sure I could make him vanish if I wanted to, but I didn't have the brain power to spare right then. "Take care of him, would you?" I asked Valen.

Valen answered grimly. "On it." There was a brief scuffle, the thud of a fist hitting flesh, a groan, and another thud.

I turned and put my hands on my hips. Valen was standing over the fallen attendant, whose nose was bleeding. "Did you have to punch him in the face?"

Valen gave me a mystified stare. "Why? Was there somewhere else you would have liked me to punch him?"

I hopped the turnstile. "I would have liked you not to punch him at all."

Valen considered the turnstile, then shrugged and vaulted it one-handed. "You told me to take care of him," he argued, trailing after me. "I took care of him. What is the problem?"

I rolled my eyes. "You've got a really straightforward approach to problem solving, don't you?"

"I am still alive after all this time, am I not?"

"So?"

"So I must be doing _something_ right." Valen's hair blew back in a sudden gust of air. He looked up. An expression of sheer annoyance crossed his face. " _Now_ what is that?"

The blast of air had smelled like steel, dust, and hydrocarbons. The howl of metal and motors got louder. "Our ride." I turned. The bullet nose of a subway car emerged from the tunnel, slowed, and pulled to a stop. The doors opened with a hiss. Above each of them, a big red-and-white 'EXIT' sign glowed. "All aboard!" I announced, and, since he seemed a little hesitant, I grabbed Valen by the hand and dragged him onto the train. "Watch out. This is gonna move fast once those doors close. You might want to hold on to something."

Valen looked around, wide-eyed. The train lurched into motion. His reflexes kicked in, and he grabbed a pole before he'd done more than wobble. I watched him look around, taking in the molded plastic seats, the advertisements plastered on the walls, the swaying handles, and, above all, the blur of a tunnel wall passing the windows at a speed no horse had ever achieved. He shook his head and turned back to me. "And I suppose you will tell me that this is normal, too."

I shrugged. "Normal is what you make of it."

At that, Valen frowned pensively. "True."

We rode the last little way in silence. The train stopped. The doors dinged and slid open. An 'EXIT' sign flickered to life. I beckoned. "Looks like this is our stop. Come on."

From the train, I'd seen nothing but tunnels and tile, but when my foot came down on the other side of the door, it came down on cobbles.

I stopped and looked at the crooked, crumbling, graffiti-covered buildings around me. This stop had _definitely_ never been on the subway map. "Shit. Valen. You're up." I turned and saw Valen. He had a look on his face that I'd never seen before. It looked almost like fear. My own blood ran cold, and my next words came out slow, crawling with dread. "What memory are we in now?"

Valen yanked me into an alleyway. "Quiet," he hissed.

I stumbled after him. I didn't have much choice. My wrist was in his hand, gripped so tightly it was starting to hurt. "Valen." I made myself say his name calmly and clearly. "Whatever it is, it isn't really happening. It's just a memory. Memories can't hurt you."

Valen's throat worked as he swallowed. "Yes." His voice was hollow. "They can."

A winged shadow appeared at the mouth of the alley. It had horns, a tail, and a flaming whip, etched so bright and hot it even showed in the shadows. "Where are you, morsel?" a voice boomed.

If that shadow wasn't cast by something straight out of Hell, I was a halfling with a pituitary disorder. "Is that him? Is that the son of a bitch who took you?" Valen nodded wordlessly. I ground my teeth. _Of all the things to dredge up..._. "Ignore him, Valen. He's dead. You killed him. Remember?"

As if to give the lie to my words, a whip cracked like thunder. Buildings lurched. Rubble rained down. "Where are you?" the voice called. "Come, now. You know that delaying the punishment will only bring you more pain."

I twisted. "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" I screamed over my shoulder. I turned back to Valen. My voice softened. "Look at me, Valen. Think about it. I wasn't here that day, was I?"

That got him to look at me. His eyes had darkened, the pupils blown out in fear and the irises tinged red with anger. "No." His voice started out uncertain, but firmed. "No. You were not. I had not met you, then."

"Right. So, if I'm here, this can't be real." The balor's whip took down another wall. Bricks crumbled. A chip of mortar stung my cheek. I tried to imagine the demon gone, the way I'd imagined the water and that paparazzi gone, but nothing changed. This wasn't my memory. I couldn't change it. I tried another tack. "This isn't happening, Valen. He's dead. You killed him. Do you remember?"

Valen inhaled shakily. "Yes. I…remember."

"Good." The shadow was almost on us. "Now, remember what the bastard looked like dead." I'd bet all the money in the world that _that_ was one of Valen's clearest memories, not to mention the happiest.

Valen's face tightened, anger starting to chase away the fear. His nodded without taking his eyes away from mine. "Gladly."

At first, it seemed like nothing was happening. Then I realized that the street had gone silent, and the shadows were clearing, leaving behind nothing more than the usual smoggy half-light of the Hive. I held very still for what seemed like forever, but the shadows didn't come back, and after a while I risked a look behind me.

There was a heap of red flesh at the mouth of the alley, glistening with fresh blood and white bone. The whip was coiled on the ground like a snake. It was black, its fire gone dark. I started to breathe again. "Shit."

Valen blinked. He looked down, jumped a little when he saw his white-knuckled grip on my wrist, and let go abruptly. He exhaled hard and fell back against the wall, scrubbing one shaking hand over his face. "Hellfire. I am sorry."

I shook my head. "I know exactly who to blame for this, and it's not you." I rubbed my wrist and walked over to the corpse, looking down. Grimash't had been an ugly motherfucker, and death had not improved his looks. I looked a few seconds longer, then spat on the corpse. Then, because that hadn't quite hit the spot, I drew up a surge of white-cold-spark power, spun on one foot, and lashed out with the other. My boot slammed into a demonic rib cage. Bone snapped. "So there," I muttered, and turned away.

Valen was still leaning against the wall. His face was white as a sheet and his tail was pressed tightly to his leg. "We need Enserric. This is getting worse."

I grunted. "I'm noticing." I retrieved Silent Partner, more for the comfort it gave than any real hope that it would help me. "It's like the Elder Brain is hoping that if it just throws a nasty enough memory at us, it'll break our will to fight."

Valen closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, they were cold with renewed determination. "Then we must escape before that happens."

I couldn't help but notice that he wasn't saying it _couldn't_ happen, just that we'd better get our asses out of here before it reached that point. I swallowed hard, nodded, and closed my eyes, listening for the familiar buzzing and searching for that black-glass splinter in my head. _Enserric. Come in, Enserric._

A voice like a butler in an airplane hanger spoke. "You _do_ have a knack for angering powerful entities, don't you?"

I opened my eyes and turned. Enserric was doing his floating head thingy again. "Aww." I clucked my tongue. That look of fear on Valen's face had made me feel like I could spit carpet tacks and battery acid. "Poor baby doesn't like it when thralls fight back? What a cryin' shame."

"And _that_ attitude, dear wielder, why you spend so much of your time being chased by things that want to kill you."

"No, I spend so much of my time being chased by things that want to kill me because I jump first and think later. Get it straight." I looked at Valen. Some color was already coming back to his face, but he was obviously a little too shaken by the sudden appearance of his erstwhile owner to take the lead. I looked at Enserric. "Enough. Where's the door?"

The door was a ways down a series of twisting alleyways. I stopped and studied it. It was rusted iron, with a dirt-clouded, four-paned mullion in the middle. Both door and doorknob were overgrown with sinewy black vines. "Razorvine," Valen offered. "Do not touch it."

I poked at it with Silent Partner, instead. The leaves shivered, and their edges shone like knives. "Can you get rid of it?"

"Let me try." Again, nothing really dramatic happened – Valen just went quiet and focused for a second, and suddenly, the vines were gone. He frowned, then shrugged and tried the doorknob. "Locked."

I eyed the door. "Got a way to unlock it?"

Valen looked around. "Perhaps." There was a ground floor window on the other side of the alleyway. It was covered with a piece of leather tarp. Valen considered it, then smiled, yanked the tarp from the window, and wound it securely around his arm. Then he turned and drove his fist through one of the door's mullions.

I watched as glass shattered and glittered and rained down on the ground, and I laughed, deep and loud. "We're breaking and entering now, huh?" I clapped my hands. "I _like_ this game."

Valen shot me a look that was half a grin and half a wince. "Fine, but could you enjoy it more quietly?" He scanned the alleyway warily. "The last thing we need is a visit from the Hardheads, dream or no dream."

I clapped a hand over my mouth. "Oops. Sorry."

Valen stuck his arm through the now-empty panes, moving slowly and gingerly to avoid gouging himself on broken glass. "Do not be sorry, just be quiet."

I drew an imaginary zipper across my lips. "Gotcha." I shifted from foot to foot. "Uh. How long is this gonna take?"

"Almost…" The lock clicked. Valen smirked. "There." His arm shifted. The doorknob turned. He withdrew his arm and shoved the door open. After a quick inspection of the interior, he stepped aside, turned to me, and held his hand out like a butler welcoming a debutante to the ball. "Your door." His smile was small and tight-lipped, like he wasn't really feeling like smiling but was making the effort anyway. "My lady."

I strolled past him and into what looked like an empty warehouse. "Much obliged," I drawled.

The little flourish with his tail at the end of his bow was probably accidental, but damnably charming nonetheless. "My pleasure."

We combed the warehouse, walking warily down rows and rows of dusty shelving. It would have gone faster if we'd split up, but like hell was I willing to risk getting separated from my sole companion in this shitfest, and Valen seemed to feel the same, so without doing anything as embarrassing as _discussing_ it we still somehow managed to avoid getting more than three feet from each other at any given time. At first, our search didn't yield much, but when I peered past the last row of shelves, I saw a telltale glow. "I think I found something."

Valen squinted towards the light, nodded, and led the way towards the glow. It turned out to be coming from a door set in the far wall, with an 'EXIT' sign above it. Valen tried the door. "Locked again," he muttered, and blew out an exasperated sigh. I could see why. This door was metal. There'd be no breaking this one, or at least, not easily. Valen put his hands on his hips and frowned at it, the tip of his tail twitching double-time. "This is ridiculous. If this is my mind, then if I can only imagine..." He frowned like a man trying to unscrew a corkscrew with telekinesis. There was a soft click from the door. His frown eased, and he tried the knob again. This time, it turned easily, and the twitch of his tail became a smug little swish. "There. Mind over matter, as you said."

I exhaled in relief. "Nice job, sunshine."

He smiled. "Thank you, my lady." The door creaked open at his push, showing nothing but blackness behind it. Valen stared into it, his smile fading, then drew his flail. It rattled like a slaver's chain. "Stay close," he cautioned.

I eyed the darkness behind the door. "You don't have to tell me twice."

We stepped through. Sight, sound, and touch cut out, and for a second, I wasn't anywhere.

Then I was somewhere, and a sound filled my ears – a faint but steady beep, like a pulse.

My vision kicked back in a split second later, and I saw antiseptic green walls, sterile plastic and metal, and a whole bunch of machines, all hooked up to a figure on the bed.

He was barely visible behind a wall of people in white coats, but that didn't matter. I knew this scene, and I knew that figure. I froze, body and brain. "Daddy?"

Valen looked at the bed, then at me. He winced. "Rebecca…"

I remembered this. Lois had left a message. I'd come here as fast as I could, but it hadn't been fast enough.

The steady beep faltered, then went flat.

White coats went into a flurry of motion. I jerked as if I'd just been punched. " _Fuck_ ," I gasped, and spun. I couldn't look at what was happening. Once had been enough. I could still hear it, though – that flatline whine, cutting through the sounds of the doctors' controlled panic.

 _You're not going to get him back_ , I told the doctors silently. Eventually, they'd fail, they'd put aside their needles and paddles, and they'd mouth their platitudes and leave the two of us alone, two empty shells in an empty room.

I felt something cool and hard against my forehead, and realized it was the window glass. My arms were clamped so tight around my middle that I was almost hunched in two, and my throat was doing that convulsing thing that throats do as a last-ditch attempt to force rising tears back down.

Valen was right. Memories _could_ hurt you.

As if the thought had summoned him, pale hands cupped my upper arms loosely, like they weren't sure they'd be welcome. "Rebecca. Look at me."

His voice was like a wisp of smoke, and so gentle that it broke me.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was turning, tear-blinded, and then there were strong arms around me and the tears came on as suddenly and fiercely as a summer storm, and all I could do was hang on to him and let the storm come.

The tears passed, almost as quickly as they'd arrived. I sniffled and blinked and slowly came to my senses. I was still huddled against Valen. _I should move._ This was a mistake. Maybe not in the short-term, but in the long run, I knew I'd regret letting him get this close. It was the situation, that was it. This was a nightmare, and he was my only safety, the only true thing I had right now. I couldn't make myself let go of him, no matter how I tried.

Still…

 _I should move._ I stayed where I was and breathed in. Valen smelled like soap, leather, chlorine, and some other scent I couldn't put into words but was all him and when I breathed it in it gave me the same soothing rush as a hit of nicotine.

 _I should move._ His hand was rubbing circles on my back and the warmth of him drove the chill of grief from my bones and it felt kind of like hugging a postbox, but in a good way, so I decided to pretend, just for a minute, that it wouldn't be a mistake to stay here just a minute longer.

I stood and breathed without saying anything, and so did he, until, a little while later, I calmed down enough that I could make myself step back. I couldn't meet his eyes, though. I covered it by rubbing mine. "I, um." I cleared my throat. "Thanks."

Valen shrugged. He let his arms slip from around me. "It was nothing."

I nodded, feeling my heart deflate like a balloon. _Right. It was nothing. He's just doing what any decent person would do._ Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar and a hug was just a hug. That was a relief. Now I just needed to ease us past this and we'd be fine. "I…I need to get out of this room." I couldn't think, not with the corpse of my father lying there, not even if it was just a memory. "Then we'll talk about what to do next."

Valen spoke quietly. "Of course." He stepped back, tacitly giving me space. "When you are ready."

I nodded and took a deep breath. "There's just one thing I need to do." It was something I'd never had the chance to do, when this memory had been made, and maybe it was a mistake to play along with the Elder Brain's game but this felt like the shadow of a second chance, and people like me didn't often get second chances.

Approaching the hospital bed felt like a walk to the gallows. The doctors had vanished while I wasn't looking, the way people did sometimes in dreams, but there was a ghost of myself sitting at the bedside, her head in her hands. I left her to her grief, and took up position on the opposite side of the bed.

Once I was there, I stood and looked down at my father. I was struck, for the second time in this lifetime, by how small he looked. Alive, his energy could fill a room, but dead, he looked so shrunken and so still. So empty.

The grief felt old, chewed around the edges by all the days and nights I'd spent worrying it, like a dog with a bone. But, like a gnawed bone, it still had its sharp edges, made worse by the way they surprised you with their sudden sting.

I took my father's hand. It was still warm. Then I bent and pressed my lips to his cheek. That was still warm, too. "Bye, Daddy." I caressed his cheek. "Love you. Always."

Then I straightened, turned, and left the empty body to its empty room.


	50. Sorrows

_Give me your hand_  
 _out of the depths_  
 _sown by your sorrows._

\- Pablo Neruda

~*~  
Chapter 50: Sorrows  
~*~

I sat on a molded plastic chair in a hospital waiting room and stared at the cup of bad coffee I held clasped between my knees. My armor and gear were back. I'd thought them back. Not that it did me much good. "I hate mindflayers."

Valen sat in the chair next to me, perched on the edge as if he wasn't sure it would hold his weight. Despite the ridiculousness of his position, his expression was so grave that I wasn't even tempted to laugh. "So do I."

I wasn't sure if he understood. "No, I mean, I really hate them." The feeling boiled in me, hot and black. I didn't think I had ever felt hatred like this before. The closest I'd come had been for that albino-eyed bitch. Heurodis and Valsharess didn't even rate. They'd only tried to kill me. This was torture. It took all of my self-control not to smash the coffee cup, scream, throw it, pick up the chair I was on and hurl it through a window. "Why is it doing this? Why not just kill us?"

Valen's voice was bleak. "Because we have made it angry with our refusal to bend, and now it wants to break us."

Us. That just made it all the worse. It wasn't just me suffering. It was Valen, who'd already suffered so much. My hands tightened into fists. Cardboard collapsed. Lukewarm coffee sloshed all over my fingers, the floor, my pants. I snarled a curse and threw the cup across the room. It left a crazy comma of coffee on the wall, a feeble punctuation to my rage, then fell far too lightly to the floor.

Valen put out a belaying hand. "Steady."

I had dream coffee all over me. I yanked some dream tissues from the dream box on the dream end table and tried to mop up the dream mess. "Damn it."

Valen didn't touch me, like the last time had burned him, but he spoke soothingly. "It wants to break us, but it shall not succeed."

How could he be so calm? I wadded the tissues into a ball and threw them away. "Don't give me that," I snapped. "It's already succeeded."

Valen's eyes snapped blue fire back at me. "We are still alive, are we not?"

At least some things were constant – no matter how bad things got, no matter how much shit life threw at us, Valen could always find a way to argue with me. "Alive, and trapped like rats in a maze," I shot back. Tears burned in my throat. I swallowed them back. Tears were a luxury I couldn't afford right now. "Every door we take just leads to another door, and behind every door is more shit."

Valen frowned down at the floor between his feet. "True." He leaned back – cautiously - and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Perhaps…perhaps we are looking for the wrong kind of door."

Well, he was from the City of Doors, so if anybody would know doors, it would be him. I bit my lip. "Okay. I'm listening."

The tiefling rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "In the Abyss, everything is a blood sport, and mercy is an alien concept. Tanar'ri feed on the fear and pain of their victims as much as their flesh, and there is no better way to instill fear than to chase and to harry and bleed them, just a little at a time."

"If this is you trying to cheer me up…"

"No." A tail thwapped the chair leg irritably. "This is me trying to make a point. If you will allow me…?"

I gritted my teeth. "Fine. What's your point?"

"My point is that demons' prey are certainly doomed as long as they play the demons' game – but if the prey remembers that it, too, has claws and teeth, it so happens even demons can bleed." The summer skies in Valen's eyes had taken on a wintry chill. "Even demons can die. Not easily. Not cleanly. But they die."

I wondered if the Elder Brain was listening. It probably was, which begged the question of why it was letting us even have this discussion. Maybe it didn't care. Maybe it figured there was no way we could hurt it. Maybe it amused it to let us hope. My fingers twisted together until they went white. "Demons are tough to kill."

Valen's smile suddenly seemed to be mostly incisors. "So are we."

 _We._ I stared down at my hands, feeling the shape and weight of this strange new 'we' settle into my head. "You think we should stop running and start fighting."

Valen cocked his head at me. "Don't you?"

My nails dug into my palms, and I pictured them…different. Sharper. Longer. Blacker. "Yes."

The tiefling's voice was soft and fierce, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the quiet ones you really had to look out for. "Then I say we fight."

An image flashed through my head – a hand, clutching something that was now a lightning bolt and then a sword. Part of me was terrified of it, and what it represented. The rest of me...

My heart pounded, and a tingling flush ran over my skin. "I want blood. Lots of it."

Valen's eyes flashed red. "Yes."

"Is that so wrong?" I couldn't tell anymore. "Is it wrong for me to feel like this?"

The tiefling hesitated, then shrugged. "I do not know, but if you are wrong, then so am I."

That was good enough for me. "All right. Let's do this." I pictured Enserric. Not the sword, or the mimir, but the man I'd glimpsed in Lomy's cage, because nothing I'd seen in that place was anything I'd soon forget. "Enserric," I called. "Get your ass over here."

The air in front of me blurred, then began to take shape. First it took on the silhouette of a man. Then it gained color, but it was all in gray. Then it gained depth, and then Enserric was there, not in some guise but as I remembered him in that cage – tall, undernourished, with steel gray eyes, longish black hair with gray wings at the temples, and a face like a thoroughbred. Currently, the expression on that face suggested that somebody had been pissing in his hay. "Are you out of your mind?" he demanded, without any preamble.

I pictured Silent Partner, and it appeared in my hands. 'So, you've been listening, have you?"

"I have, and I think that going up against an Elder Brain is an abominable idea."

"We are already up against an Elder Brain," Valen put in grimly. "We did not start this fight. All we can do is try to end it."

"You can certainly try, young man." Enserric sniffed. "Succeeding, however, is another matter entirely."

I angled Silent Partner so that its tip was pointed at Enserric like a stern finger. "You said it can't get at your mind, and as long as our minds are connected, you can protect mine. Won't that give us an edge?"

Enserric frowned. "It may." The sword/mage/spirit crossed his bony arms over his bony chest, tapped his foot, thought a minute, and sighed. "Very well. For the record, I think this is a very dicey gambit, but if both of you are convinced…" He trailed off meaningfully.

I exchanged glances with Valen. The tiefling's baby blues held nothing but rock-solid certainty, so I looked back to Enserric and nodded. "We are."

Enserric sighed. "Very well. I shall do my best to aid you, wielder."

"That's mighty kind of you."

"Not particularly. I simple have no desire to spend the next eon gathering both dust and slime, and I would rather go back to staring at my own corpse than at some giant, ill-tempered cerebellum."

"Fair enough." If I were him, I'd feel the same. "Which way, then?

Enserric looked around, frowning. "This way," he announced, and led the way down the hall, his robe fluttering around his bony shins.

We strode down the hospital hallway, Enserric in the lead with me and Valen shoulder-to-shoulder behind him, weapons in hand. Dream-nurses and dream-doctors saw us coming, shouted, and dove for cover.

I looked at the fleeing crowds. "I swear this didn't happen last time."

Valen frowned. "We can obviously alter some things."

Enserric looked over his shoulder. "You are rewiring your neural circuitry," he said, as if it should be so obvious. "Altering your memories, if only temporarily."

I scowled. The terminology he'd used was decidedly not local. "Have you been visiting my memories of science class again?"

Enserric snorted. He swept around a corner, his robes hitched to his knees and pinched between his fingers, like a little girl gone picking wildflowers in a meadow. "Now, now," he chided. "Do not be unreasonable. I take pains not to venture into thoughts you consider private, but given your indifference to your own education, I felt there was no harm in taking a peek." His lips formed a thoughtful moue. "And some aspects of your world truly are fascinating. The theoretical implications alone…" We reached the end of the hall, where there was a lone door. Enserric stopped, inspected it, and nodded. "A-ha! In here."

I eyed the doors. "The janitor's closet?"

Valen scoffed. "And you were complaining about the arena access through the bathrooms."

I scoffed back. "That's different. Your world is weirder than mine."

Valen's gaze swept all the beeping machinery that lined the hospital's hall. "I beg to differ."

Enserric opened the broom closet, looked in, then nodded. "This looks like it will lead to our quarry," he said, of a room full of cleaning supplies and spare lightbulbs. He stood aside and bowed. "After you, my wielder."

It was probably time to give up trying to make sense of any of this. "All aboard who's coming aboard," I said, and stepped into the broom closet.

My feet hit something mushy that stank of rotting vegetation, rust, ash, and corpses.

I stared around me, my heart sinking. We were on a loamy hillock in the middle of a vast swamp that rolled out beneath a black sky. The air was cold, but the ground was warm. Heat, steam, and an eerie red glow all rose from it. The light was dim, but so diffuse and pervasive that it turned the whole horizon red.

I turned. My boots squelched, and the sound travelled unnaturally far, like the air was too thin to resist the sound's passage. I felt unnaturally light, too, as if the gravity here didn't work quite the way I was used to.

In the distance loomed shadowy lumps that might have been mountains. A dark sheen and a faint burble hinted at the presence of moving water somewhere. And then there were other, more troubling sounds – drumbeats, screams, explosions, crashing metal, breaking wood. It sounded like there was a war going on, some miles distant.

I looked up. There were no stars. No sun. No moon. Just an empty black sky and a bloody horizon.

I lowered my eyes from the horizon. An obelisk stood on a hillock maybe half a mile away. It was big and black and thin, like a needle. Strange figures glowed, eerie carvings for which the word 'eldritch' had probably been invented.

I lowered my eyes further. An empty skull stared back at me, and when I looked, I saw more still, skulls and bones and rusting weapons and standing stones rising from the mud and stagnant water like the bones of dead cities.

I tore my eyes away from the graveyard sight and shivered. On top of everything else, the air had a sharp chill, and it tasted like rust, or maybe blood. I would have liked to run, but there was nowhere to run, so I turned to Valen instead. "Uhhh. Valen?" The sound of my voice traveled strangely, too. "Where are we?"

Valen took one look around us and started laughing – not like this was funny, but like it really wasn't funny _at all_. "Tarterus."

That word meant nothing to me. "Come again?"

"Carceri." Valen's voice was rough, and he had to stop to rub his eyes. "The Red Prison. We are on the first layer. Othrys. A borderland, between the Nine Hells and the Abyss." His lips twitched. "It is one of the main battlegrounds of the Blood War."

Now, those words - those words meant something. They meant something very, very bad. "Oh, shit."

"Yes." Valen chuckled in an unsteady way that sounded disturbingly close to a giggle. "Those are the first words of every poor sod who gets hipped in Carceri. Well done. We shall make a planar of you yet."

I eyed him. That laughter didn't sound so much like humor as hysterics. "Are you okay?"

Valen hiccoughed. "No."

At least he was honest. I put a hand on his shoulder. It took an effort not to yank my hand away. His mithril had vanished, to be replaced with a black-iron breastplate with spikes. Whatever his new armor was made of, it felt awful – cold and slick and just plain wrong. It didn't belong on him. Not the Valen I knew. "Stay with me, sunshine. This is just another memory."

Valen visibly got a grip on himself, although there was something in the way he tightened his jaw that suggested he was trying to keep his teeth from chattering. "Yes. Just a memory." He looked around, and his frown deepened into perplexity. "But…is this truly my memory? I do not recognize it."

There were splotches of gray void all over this place – not just holes, but vast, sucking pits that swallowed huge swathes of the landscape. I decided not to point them out. Just because years of trauma had turned portions of Valen's brain to Swiss cheese was no reason for me to rub his face in it. "Well, whatever it is, something tells me we shouldn't hang arou-" I stopped dead. Valen was staring at something behind me. My blood curdled. "V-valen?"

Wordlessly, and without taking his eyes off of whatever he saw, Valen reached out, put his hand on top of my head, and rotated my head about forty-five degrees to the left.

The horizon had darkened. At first, it seemed like the steam had thickened. Then it took on the shape of an army.

The infantry was made of fleshy, oozing blobs. I could hear them blubbering and moaning from here. Still, they moved in strange concert, as did the other things in that army. There were almost-human things with barbed pikes, gaunt figures with so many spikes they looked like porcupine corpses, things like gargoyles and things like flies and things that defied description, but the thing that struck me most of all was the eerie, silent discipline with which they all moved, marching in time with the drumbeat. I'd have expected the armies of Hell to be a mess of blood and screaming, but this one acted like it was on a mission.

Valen's voice was distant, thoughtful. "Oh. _Now_ I remember."

 _Now_ he remembered? I gaped at the oncoming army. "What the fuck is that?!"

The tiefling's weapon was in his hands. "Those are baatezu troops." His face was chalk-white, his eyes red-tinged. "And this was the first battle I ever faced. It has featured in my nightmares...too many times to count." He had to pause and swallow before going on, his voice diamond-hard. "I suppose it should be no surprise that the Elder Brain would try to shake me with this." His hand tightened on his flail. "It shall not succeed."

I wished Valen sounded more convinced and less like he was trying to convince himself. "Good, 'cause we need to leave. Now." I couldn't take my eyes away from that army. "Enserric!" My voice was shrill with panic. "Where the hell are you?!"

The dead mage appeared next to me with a pop. "Hah! An apropos choice of words, all things considered," he said, with totally inappropriate joviality.

I tried not to scream at him. "Cut the comedy and tell me how we get out of here."

It was Valen who answered. "There is a portal." He lifted a pale hand, pointing. "The obelisk. It holds a portal to the Abyss. One of the few. We were...to guard it." He swallowed. "When I was here."

I spun. The obelisk I'd seen before was still there – tall, black, thin, and too far away for comfort. "Will that bring us closer to the Elder Brain?"

Enserric tucked his thin hands into the sleeves of his robe and squinted at the distant monument. "I believe so." He shot me a curious look. "Can't you see it?"

"See what?" I returned his stare blankly. "The obelisk? Sure, I can see it. It's fifty feet high."

The mage shook his head. "No. I do not speak of any physical thing. I speak of the places where the fabric of this spell are weakest. Can you not see the...the distortion?"

It just looked like a creepy sculpture to me. "All I can see is that army over there and our way out over there."

Enserric shrugged. "Perhaps death has opened my eyes to things I could not see in life." His lip curled in a humorless smile. "Life, as they say, is wasted on the living."

I stared at him a moment longer, then gave up. I didn't even know if he knew what he was doing. Maybe, maybe not. But I couldn't see any other options, so I gritted my teeth and hitched my belt and said, "Yeah, well, I'd like to keep on living, so if that's the way forward, then let's go." Then I suited action to words and started picking my way to the obelisk. This swamp was eerie and gross, but I'd traveled through swamps before, so I used Silent Partner to tap my way along solid ground and kept my eyes peeled for any signs of movement. Any signs of movement that didn't come from the army on our tail, anyway.

Valen followed, but his face was grim and uncertain. "They are moving quickly. I am not sure we can make it without a fight."

I risked a peek over my shoulder and swallowed. He was right. They were getting closer. "Can't you just imagine them gone?"

Valen grimaced. "Imagining a door unlocked is one thing. Imagining an entire baatezu legion, gone, just like that…" He trailed off and looked down, flushing. "I cannot. I tried. It is...too much. Beyond my ability to imagine."

I gritted my teeth to keep from yelling at him and faced forward, my quarterstaff tap-tapping sharply on the loam. "Okay, got it. We can only change little things, like hardware, not big things, like armies."

Enserric hurried along at my side, wearing a disgusted sneer and hiking his robe up to his knees so the hem wouldn't drag in the mud. "If you can just hold them off…"

"Sure. Hold off an army. Why didn't I think of that?"

"There are not that many of them," Enserric snapped back. "And you, my dear, idiot wielder, have more than enough power for the task."

I grunted. "So why don't I feel powerful?"

"Because you are afraid."

"Of that army? Damn straight."

"No." Enserric's eyes were the color of steel, but reflected Carceri's not-light in a way that made them glint red, for an instant. "Of yourself."

I flushed and opened my mouth to answer, though what with, I didn't know.

Luckily, or maybe unluckily, Valen's shout cut us both off. "Eyes up!"

My head snapped up in time to see a gargoyle, or something a lot like one, swoop out of the sky. It was gray and mottled and had spikes like a porcupine, and as it loomed, I saw those spikes lift and rattle and on instinct I raised Silent Partner and brought it 'round, dragging the thin air into a barrier.

The spikes made little pock-pock noises as they peppered the ground all around us, driving up little sprays of mud and stagnant water. The ones that had been headed for us didn't stop, but when they ran into my shield, they lost enough momentum that they spun and tumbled and bounced off of us without piercing.

The gargoyle thing paused to look, then, without further ado, turned and swooped away, back towards the marching force.

I watched it go, shaken. It hadn't even made a sound. If Valen hadn't seen it, we might all have been turned into pincushions, and while I didn't know if you could actually die in a dream, I didn't want to find out. "What was that thing?"

Valen took my elbow and hustled me forward. "Spinagon." His tail was lashing, and his eyes were hot. "They serve as scouts. It will report back, and then we will have that entire force on our tails."

I let myself get hustled. Anything to get out of here faster. "Any pointers on fighting baatezu?"

"Yes. Don't."

"Very funny."

"Do I look like I am joking?"

"No, but then, you hardly ever do." We scrambled up the little hillock to the obelisk. Enserric immediately began running his hands over it and muttering to himself. Acting on some unspoken accord, Valen and I turned and stood shoulder-to-shoulder, standing between the mage and the baatezu horde. My pulse ran so hard and fast it felt like dice rattling inside my head. "What now?"

Valen surveyed the situation. His voice was strained. "We have the high ground, which is good." He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on Silent Partner. "At all costs we must avoid a pitched fight. You do not have the skill for close combat. Not in this scrum."

I couldn't say he was wrong. "Fine. How do we hold them off?"

Valen's eyes glinted red. "Kill the commanders." He pointed. "Most of the force is made of lemures – brainless cannon fodder." He shaded his eyes, then smiled. It was not a friendly smile. "There. Just as I supposed. A barbazu. He will be their minder. Without him, they will lose all discipline." He looked to me. "Lemures are only dangerous if you allow them to surround you and overwhelm you with their numbers. Thin their ranks. Clear a path to the barbazu." He shook his flail free and rolled his shoulders to loosen them. "I shall deal with him."

I looked up and bit my lip. "How am I supposed to thin them out?" Bottled lightning wouldn't cut the mustard against this crew. "There's not a cloud in the sky, if that even is a sky."

Valen was silent for an unsettlingly long while, and so still that I was just about to start freaking out when he finally, _finally_ looked up, and smiled a little at the sky. "Will this do?"

I looked up, too. There were red clouds gathering, and where they gathered, white flashes leapt between them.

I couldn't believe it. Forget flowers or chocolates – Valen had just given me a storm. My eyes blurred, and my voice veered embarrassingly close to a squeal. "For me?"

Valen smiled. "For you." He jerked his chin at the approaching army. "Now, go kill those bastards, would you?"

I drank in the sight of the gathering storm, made greedy by long thirst, like a wanderer in the desert. "I'd love to." I waved a hand. "Stand back." Valen did. Then, because the first ranks were closing in, I grounded Silent Partner, took a couple of bracing breaths, and set to work.

Closing my eyes on that horror show was one of the hardest things I'd ever done, but I had to do it so I did it. Terror quivered in my throat. I pinned it and grabbed it, like a snake, and fed it into green fire. Worry went, too, and uncertainty.

 _Throw it all in the fire_ , the memory of Xanos told me. _Feed it. Let it grow._

Anger, though – that one, I held on to, because the harder I held it, the hotter the fire burned. The sun-shade feel of Shaundakul's presence, too, I kept close, to keep the fire from burning me.

And one more thing – not mine, but I could feel it steadying me, like a hand on my shoulder. _Valen_. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that I could _feel_ his confidence, his iron-clad belief that I could do this and any of my feelings to the contrary were just the doubt talking. I could feel it as if it was flowing straight from his mind to mine, buoying me up and feeding the storm beneath my heart.

Pressure built behind my temples. My pulse whirred like a hummingbird's wings. Sparks buzzed and snapped in the air around me, and I shuddered and tasted ozone on the tip of my tongue.

 _Strange_ , I thought, how calm I felt. Maybe this was what it was like to stand in the eye of a hurricane. Maybe this was what it felt like to _be_ a hurricane.

I opened my eyes. Red clouds had gathered. A web of white light hovered in the black sky, flickering. I could feel it bearing down on me and pulling at me, all at once, until I felt like I was about to fly apart.

Then I looked at the nearest rank of demons and let it all go.

The sudden release of all that pent-up force brought a relief so profound it almost felt like sex. My body jerked. White flashes struck, so many that they all blurred together. Hail thudded into flesh, flesh burned, and black smoke rose over the battlefield.

Bodies dropped. I didn't even know how many. Calm reigned, for a split second. I tried to see through the wall of smoke and wind.

Then a purple-skinned thing with snakes writhing out of its face burst out of the smoke, whirling a hook-bladed glaive.

I yelped and jumped back, but before the thing could reach me, Valen had already stepped between us, swung his flail, swiped the glaive out of the thing's hands, then followed up with a brutal kick to the solar plexus and a flail to the side of the head. Bone crunched. Bits of barbazu head pattered to the ground. "Any time, Enserric," Valen said between clenched teeth.

More lemures were coming, slow but unstoppable, oozing over their dead comrades. I turned, called a fork of lightning down from the sky, grabbed it, wound it around my hand like a whip, then lashed out. The lightning looped around two of the horrible fleshy things and held. I heaved. The chain swung. Some of the lemures turned to look, and saw a line of white light coming at them, waist-height, with two of their number trapped in it. Then the chain swept into them, and they burst apart into smoking chunks in a way I was pretty sure I'd revisit in my nightmares.

That took care of a dozen more, but they just kept coming on and the sky kept darkening and there were still only two of us and a whole hell of a lot of them. I gritted my teeth and called down another lightning strike. Bodies flew. More came on through the smoke. I was breaking the waves, but I couldn't stem the tide. "Enserric!"

Finally, a sliver of light appeared in the obelisk, which parted in two with a grating of stone. Light shone out of it. The mage darted to my side. "Go," he panted. "Quickly."

I wasn't about to argue. I charged through the gap, Valen hot on my heels.

I stumbled into coolness. My feet slipped on damp grass. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," I panted. It wasn't the most inventive swearing I'd ever done, but it came from the heart. I raised Silent Partner, my heart pounding. "Now what the fuck is thi-" The signals from my eyes reached my brain. I lowered Silent Partner. "Oh. That's what the fuck this is." My shoulders sagged. This wasn't working. We were still in the maze, and I couldn't tell whether we were getting closer to the heart of it or just running around in circles. "Damn it."

Valen spun, breathing hard, his eyes raking the shadows under the trees for enemies. "Where are we now?"

I swallowed and stared at the picture frame. It stood in its clear little space under the trees. Afterimages of myself appeared before it – standing, staring, pacing, railing silently. I looked terrible. I looked sick, but not sick in the flesh. I looked sick in the soul.

I looked up. It was night – a clear night, like that night so long ago, and how strange it was to find out how vivid my memory of this place was. Apparently, some things you just couldn't forget. "We're home. Again."

Valen lowered his flail, breathing hard. His eyes glowed a sullen red. "Any danger?"

I looked around. "No armies, if that's what you're asking."

He nodded. "Good. Excuse me." Then he turned and started hitting a tree. With his flail. Repeatedly. In grim, furious silence that was almost worse than if he'd been screaming curses.

I stood back and waited quietly amidst the sound of splintering tree bark. I didn't ask him if he was all right, because he pretty clearly wasn't. When he finally lowered his flail, I studied the tree, or what was left of it. "Better?" I asked.

"No, but at least I do not want to kill something quite as badly." His nostrils flared as he tried to catch his breath. "I am sorry." The moon leeched his face of color, but it didn't hide the darkening flush on his cheeks, or the way he looked down, as if ashamed. "You…should not have had to see that."

I shrugged. "Wasn't bad." I half-grinned. "Wait until you see me lose my temper."

"I thought I had."

I remembered the albino-eyed woman. "Not really, no." I looked away. "'Sides, there's plenty of stuff here neither of us wanted to show anyone." My voice was gruff. If I had to choose between dealing with another baatezu army and having to have this discussion, I'd have gone with the army. "I won't tell anybody if you won't."

He couldn't quite hide the relief in his voice. "Agreed." He looked around, pretty clearly looking for some excuse to change the subject. His eyes fell on the picture frame. "That is a portal." His eyes glinted red as he looked at me. I couldn't tell if it was because of the low light or his fading temper. "This is the portal that took you to the Seer's world, isn't it?"

"Yes." I looked at my hands. They were empty except for a smear of blood across my left palm, black in the moonlight. There was a hole there, barely more than a splinter's width, but blood just kept seeping out of it. I frowned. "And I know the key." I laughed. My throat ached. "For what it's worth."

Valen frowned. "Do we go through?"

An 'EXIT' sign flickered faintly in the air. I stared at it glumly. "You got any better ideas?"

Valen's face looked as glum as mine. "I fear that I do not." He stared at the portal, heaved a sigh, and looked at me. "Very well. What is the key?"

I knelt, set Silent Partner aside, twined some blades of grass around my fingers, and yanked. They came free. I chose the prettiest two and let the others fall. One, I gave to Valen. The other, I kept for myself. "That's one half of the key."

Valen cupped the grass carefully, as if afraid to crush it. "And the other?"

"A shard of glass," I said quietly, and when I looked again, there it was, sparkling and blood-flecked in my left hand. At first, I wasn't sure what to do with it. Then it came to me, and I reached out and took Valen's left hand in mine, so that we were both holding the little shard of bloody black glass. "Come on," I said. "Time's wasting."

We stepped through…

…and then we were in a room that was barely more than a cell. A cot was attached to the wall by two chains. There was a woman on it. She was lying on her side, facing the wall. I saw a fall of golden hair, pale skin with spots like a leopard and an unnatural purplish tint to it, the line of a delicate shoulder, the curve of a bare hip. "Valen," she called languidly, and made as if to roll over. "Come back to bed."

I stared, then yanked my eyes away. I shouldn't be seeing this. This was too personal. I had no business here. I was only here as a twist of the knife that this memory would drive into Valen's heart, and one look at Valen's face told me that the blow had landed and gone in deep.

Valen's expression hurt just to see – raw emotions warred there, too many to name, although if I had to name two, one would be love and the other would be agony. I didn't want to step between him and the ghost on the bed, but I didn't want him to get suckered in by the Elder Brain, either. I settled for putting a hand on his shoulder. "Valen, look at me. It's not real. It's just the Elder Brain fucking with your head." I felt a tiny sliver of hope, at that. "Maybe we're getting closer. Maybe that's why it's getting worse. Just…don't let yourself get pulled in, okay?"

He stared, then shuddered and looked away from her and into my eyes. His own eyes were red-rimmed, his knuckles were white on his flail, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. "It will pay for this," he grated.

I squeezed his shoulder. "We'll make it pay," I assured him. My blood was boiling, but my voice had gone ice cold. "If it's the last thing we do."

He nodded without taking his eyes off mine, as if my face was the only safe thing for him to look at right then. "Good." Then he turned on his heel and marched out of that room like it was on fire.

I followed him out, not really sure what to say or even if there was anything I could say. I realized that I still had Enserric in hand. Where had I left Silent Partner? Never mind – that wasn't important right now. "Enserric. Where to?"

The sword flickered. "Straight ahead."

There was a haze at the end of the hall. As we approached, the 'EXIT' sign appeared. Resigned, we stepped through…

…and I was crouched in the middle of a dirt road. Moonlight shone on bodies all around me. Arrows whistled, but I didn't hear them. I stared into the open eyes of a dead man, bald and baby-faced with a teardrop tattooed at the corner of one eye, and felt something break inside me. "Harry."

Metal flashed next to me. Something pinged off of it. "I do not wish to interrupt, but can you do something about those arrows?" Valen said from between gritted teeth. He was hovering by my side, his arms outstretched. At some point, he'd thought his armor back on – the mithril version, not the Hellraiser version. "I am one person. I cannot shield you on four sides."

I cringed in remembered terror. There was shouting all around us, and arrows flying, and people getting hurt, and suddenly it was like no time had passed at all and I was the naïve Earthling, untrained and untested. "What? Me? No, I can't…"

Valen yanked me to my feet and turned me to face him. "You are not helpless," he said urgently. "Far from it. Do not let this thing convince you otherwise." Another arrow bounced off of his elbow, and he grimaced. "Call the wind, Rebecca." He said it in the General's voice, which brooked no argument. "Do it. Now."

I stared into his blue eyes. He was blurry. So were the lights. It took me a moment to realize that I was crying again, but his eyes were so blue and his voice was so steady and this wasn't real and suddenly I wasn't scared but I was seriously pissed off.

Fury boiled out of me. I spun with a yell. My shout echoed out over the road, and the wind chased it. Arrows blew like twigs, dust rose, fires leapt, and the people, they just blew apart into tatters, like clouds – like they'd never even been.

Harry stayed, though. Some things were too heavy to be moved, even by a hurricane.

The wind died down. A couple of trees cracked and fell, too, with a whole lot of noise. I watched them go down, taking a few more trees with them, then spoke, my voice shaking. "Hey, I've got a question."

Valen eyed the road, then relaxed a little on seeing that I'd pretty much scoured it clean. "Which is?"

"If a tree falls in my head, does it make a sound?" Then I started laughing and I couldn't stop.

Valen tightened his grip on my shoulders. "Steady."

My laughs turned into gasps, then into gulping sobs. "I think I'm losing my mind."

Valen shook his head. "That is exactly what it wants," he told me, his eyes holding mine as if he wanted to drive home his point with the force of his gaze. "Do not let it win, Rebecca."

Win. What did winning matter? We were trapped, going 'round and 'round this carousel of shit, and now this thing was making me relive the death of the best person I'd ever known, because it wasn't enough to control me. It wanted to _hurt_ me.

I didn't have a word for the rage that filled me then. It seemed like too much for one skin to contain. "I'm going to kill it," I snarled.

Valen raised his eyebrows. "That's the spirit." He studied my face with cautious concern. "I think."

My rant gained steam, my voice shaking with pure, unadulterated wrath. "I'm going to rip that motherfucker into little tiny pieces, and then I am going to jump up and down on the pieces, and them I am going to shit-"

Valen lifted a forestalling hand. "Peace. I think you have made your point."

"My point?" My laugh was a hollow bark. "That's right, isn't it? I have a point. Points and edges and…" I trailed off, turned, and looked at Harry's body. He looked so peaceful. He'd always been peaceful, unlike me. I looked at my hands. There was still blood on my left palm. "It never was mine, was it?" I murmured, and laughed again, crazily and a little sadly. "Enserric was right."

Valen's concern was trending towards alarm. "What are you talking about?"

I knelt by Harry's body. "Something I should have realized a long time ago. I guess I just didn't want to admit it." I held out a hand, and thought of Silent Partner. Zalantar – as warm and living and dark as a forest night – filled my hand. It seemed far heavier than it had any right to be. I looked at it, running my hand lovingly along its haft and feeling the way the wood tingled under my skin, so familiar and so comforting. Then, with a sigh, I laid the quarterstaff down next to Harry. "It was never my weapon." I had a soul in the shape of a sword, not a shepherd's crook. "It was always his." Tears were falling, hot and fast. I paid them no mind. "I was just borrowing it for a while."

Valen watched me. His stance had softened, as had his voice and his eyes. "I understand." Sadness pulled at the corners of his mouth. "Sometimes we are not what we would wish to be, and all the wishing in the world will not change that."

I sighed. "Ain't that the truth." I took the monk's dead hand and folded his fingers around Silent Partner's haft, where they belonged. "Sleep well, old friend," I said, to both of them. "I'll see you again in the next life, maybe." I levered myself to my feet, held out my hand, and called. "Enserric. To me."

The sword appeared in my hand instantaneously - like it had always been there, and had just been waiting for my call. It shone like a bloody supernova, it felt as inevitable as death, and it sounded like one smug motherfucker. "Would now be a good time to say 'I told you so'?"

I ground my teeth. "Not the time, Enserric."

The sword flickered, and the black glass sliver in my head went soft, for an instant. "I…am sorry, wielder."

"Don't be sorry, just don't be an asshole."

"That, I fear, is a request I cannot accommodate."

"I know." He was my weapon, after all. I gestured with the sword. "Find us a way in. I'm done with this."

"Your wish is my command, wielder." The sword glowed. An 'EXIT' sign appeared, hovering in midair under leafy branches. "There. Through that gap in the trees."

That was no more or less nonsensical than anything else that had happened so far. "All right," I said, and led Valen away, my sword glittering like a starry night.

Another step into the shadows, another shift, and we stood on a white salt plain where winged shapes circled in a blood-red sky.

Enserric found the door buried beneath the salt, a scant few inches down. Valen and I uncovered it and heaved it open. It yawned like an open grave.

The tiefling and I looked at each other. "Do we go in?" I asked.

Valen looked into the doorway and shrugged. "Do you have any better ideas?"

I laughed bitterly. "I'm all out of ideas."

"So am I."

I stared into the dark. It sucked at the eye like a black hole. There was no way I was going to be able to conjure up the nerve to jump in there by myself. My hand reached out blindly. It found Valen's, all scars and callouses and warmth. That helped. "Count of three?" I suggested.

Valen nodded. His fingers squeezed mine. "On three."

In unison, we counted to three, then jumped, hand-in-hand.

 _shift_

We were underground. Stone was shaking all around us, and the ceiling was starting to come down. A white-bearded, bespectacled dwarf stood in front of an open portal. He was covered in blood. "Don't leave me here, lass," he begged.

His plea hit me like a fist to the gut. I took a half-step forward, my hand held out. "Drogan, I'm sorry, I couldn't-"

Something stopped me. "Rebecca." A hand was on my shoulder. "This is a trick. Come away, or we will die with him."

I shuddered. "Maybe I should have."

Valen's snarl answered me. "Like Hell you should have." His hand tightened, pulling me away. "You are not giving up and letting the Elder Brain win, do you hear me?"

He was right. I couldn't give up. Then I'd have his death on my conscience, too – for however long I still had enough brains to have a conscience. "All right," I said hoarsely, and let him pull me through the portal, trying and failing to close my ears to Drogan's pleas and the awful groan of stone coming apart at the seams, and then…

 _shift_

We were somewhere with steaming yellow lakes and an awful stench, and something was rising out of the lake, something with spikes and mandibles and a shining carapace, and Valen was yanking me out of the way and dragging me towards a gap in a rocky wall…

 _shift_

I was buried in white – heavy, cold, crushing. I couldn't breathe, and when I opened my mouth to scream, it filled with snow.

I panicked. Thinking wasn't an option. Reacting – fighting – was, but I was trapped and helpless and didn't even have a weapon in my hand and please don't let me die like this, Shaundakul, not like this.

A hand closed around my wrist and pulled. Snow groaned, then all at once, gave way in an explosion of white powder. Strong hands grabbed me unceremoniously under the armpits and hauled me out, then gathered me into arms that were as warm as the snow was cold. "Relax," a smoky voice murmured in my ear. "I have you. You are safe. Relax." A rough hand pushed my hair back from my face. "Say something, Rebecca. Are you all right?"

I clung to him, blinking snowmelt from my eyelashes. My breath was fast and panicky, and I couldn't stop shivering. "I've b-been b-better."

Between the dark circles under his eyes and the now-haggard pallor of his face, the tiefling looked like he hadn't slept in a month. "You are not the only one."

He was right. We needed to get out of here, or else both of us were going to go briefly insane before the flayers mercifully liquefied what was left of our brains. Enserric was back in my hand. I held him up in front of my eyes. "Way out. Now. F-find it."

Doubt had crept into the sword's voice. "I am not so certain…"

This was no time for doubt. "Why not?"

Enserric sighed. "Each step we take only takes us to another location in your minds, just as before. I am sorry. I…am serving you as well as I can, but I do not know if it will be enough."

Exhaustion and despair weighed on me like a lead blanket. Dully, I looked at Valen. "Do we keep trying?"

He looked back grimly. "We keep trying until we can try no more."

My heart eased a little. "Then it looks like we're on the same page." If I had to go down, I wanted it to be with a roar, not a whimper. "Find the weakness, Enserric, and we'll see where it leads."

This time, the exit was Nathan Hurst's old farm wagon, and when we stepped up on it…

 _shift_

My feet touched the ground in a huge onyx chamber. Cages hung from the ceiling over a pit of lava. Chains, blood, and screaming figured heavily in the décor.

There was a figure standing in the center of the chamber. He was huge, easily above ten feet tall, and winged and red and held a flaming whip. There was a body at his feet.

I looked at the body. It had blood-matted blonde hair and pale purple skin, now white and red and gray.

I took the corpse's features in, then looked up with a sinking heart. Grimash't smiled, his burning eyes on Valen. "There," he said, in a voice like a lion's purr, and casually kicked the body to one side, where it flopped limply into the lava. "That should teach you to disobey me, shouldn't it, slave?"

My stomach wrenched. The fury was rising. Again. If I kept this up, I was going to give myself an aneurysm before the Elder Brain could. My lips peeled back in a snarl, aimed at the balor. "You vicious bastard…"

Valen had fallen to his knees and was staring at the spot where the body had fallen. His whole posture was hunched, curled in on himself, as if he'd been struck by a mortal blow. "No," he whispered. "Not this."

One look at the tiefling's face and I forgot all about the balor, which I would have thought was pretty hard to do until I saw Valen's face. Before I knew it I was standing in front of him, shielding him from the balor and the scene alike with my body. I reached out to cup his cheek, not certain what to do, but at the touch of my hand he resolved the issue by leaning into me and burying his face against my midsection. He was shivering. Tentatively, I touched his hair. "It's all right, babe," I tried to soothe him, even though I really was no good at being comforting. "It's just a nightmare. It's not real."

At those words, Valen sucked in a breath and looked at me, his eyes wide and brimming but his face as grim as midwinter in the Spine of the World. "Yes, it is," he said, his voice grating. "It is, it was, and I will not betray her memory by pretending otherwise."

My heart twisted. _That's Valen for you._ He wasn't just loyal to the end. He was loyal even past the end. I sighed and stroked his hair. It really did feel as silky as it looked. "You're one stubborn son of a bitch, you know that?"

His laugh was shaky and dark. "How do you think I have survived this long?"

The shadows were moving. I eyed them. "Good. Laughter's good." I heard heavy footsteps behind me. "Hold on to tha-" I blinked, and suddenly I wasn't holding Valen anymore, and there was metal around my wrists and weight pulling on my shoulder sockets. I looked up. I was chained to the wall. Also, my clothes had vanished again, which struck me as a little excessive, especially for somebody who was basically a squid. I glared at the manacles around my wrists. "Oh, you have _got_ to be kidding me."

Grimash't stepped up to me. I got a whiff of rotten eggs, a blast of heat like an open furnace, and a good view into his burning eyes. "What is this, slave?" he asked over his shoulder. "Do you need another lesson in pain?"

Valen had shot to his feet, and now stood staring. Horror contorted his face, and pain, and growing rage. "Oh, Hells no…" he snarled, and reached for his flail.

I would have raised a hand to stop him, but I was a little short on hands at the moment, so I settled for raising my voice. "Stay there." The balor was stroking his whip in a creepily suggestive way. I tried not to look. _This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real._ "I'm fine."

Valen hesitated, balanced on the balls of his feet as if he couldn't decide whether to stay put or rush the dream balor. "FINE?!" he roared, which made this the first time I'd ever heard him raise his voice. "You call that fine?"

"It's not real, Valen." A fiery whip cracked way too close to my face, and I knew it wasn't real but boy did it feel real, especially when the backwash of heat hit me, near-blistering my skin. I jerked away, acting on sheer animal instinct. Chains jangled, the bones in my wrists ground together. I groaned, and Grimash't smiled. I tried to ignore him. "Just…try to think him gone, would you?" I yelled. "Remember, Valen! It's. Not. Real!"

Grimash't seemed equally perplexed, if for an entirely different reason. "Not real?" the balor echoed. He looked at me and smiled. His burning eyes turned black. "Oh, but it is, thrall. Haven't you been listening? Thought is the only reality there is, and no matter how you struggle, you cannot escape mine."

I stared at the balor-not-balor. Rage turned my vision red. "No, fuck _you_ ," I said, and thought of fog.

My body dissolved in an instant, and I slipped my bonds, leaving the balor-not-balor staring at the place where I had been. If I'd had lips, I would have smiled. _Can't chain the wind, motherfucker._

I didn't waste time, but flowed right back to Valen and re-materialized in front of him with Enserric already in my hands. "See?" I said brightly. "I'm f-" Hoofbeats struck the stone behind me. "-fuck." I turned, shoving Valen behind me. A frustrated sigh boiled out of my throat. "You again?"

The balor-not-balor was coming after me in an unhurried but inexorable plod. "You cannot escape, thralls."

I rolled my eyes. This thing needed to use its super-mega-genius brain to come up with some new lines. "Yeah, yeah, you said that." He had a point, though. "Enserric. Get us out. Now."

The sword blazed red. "Done. Look up, wielder."

I looked up, although the sudden wind that blew my hair across my face had already given me a clue that something had changed.

The ceiling was gone. In its place was a sunless orange sky. I stared up at it. "Damn. Talk about blowing the roof off the place." The balor/illithid was coming, and with Valen down for the count there was no fighting it, and maybe this was a dream and we couldn't actually die, but I wasn't sticking around to find out. "Come on, sunshine." I got an arm around his shoulders and thought of the morning mist over Hilltop. "Up we go."

We dissolved into mist. The wind pulled us up and out, and…

 _shift_

The ground tilted crazily underfoot. My feet – booted again, thank Shaundakul - slipped on broken glass and stone. Acting on either animal instinct or training, I dropped to a crouch before I could fall, and looked around, wild-eyed.

I was surrounded by stone and glass and the sky, on the tallest spire of a shattered city, and the floor was tilting under my feet because Undrentide was entering its death spiral.

A scrape behind me drew my attention. I whirled, still in a crouch, so fast I almost toppled. Valen was leaning against a broken column, his face drawn and his eyes closed. He didn't look hurt – not physically, at least. He just looked like that last memory had been the last straw, and now he was going to check out for a while.

I rushed to him, stumbling a little in my haste. My hands framed his cheeks, my fingers brushed his hair from his face, frantic. "Open your eyes, babe," I urged. "Open your eyes. We've got to keep going."

Valen opened his eyes, but didn't move. He looked like a man who'd found the light at the end of the tunnel, and it had turned out to be an oncoming train. "Why? We are getting nowhere."

I swallowed a scream of frustration. "Because we're not giving up until we're dead, that's why." I smacked his shoulder with an open palm, like he was a balky horse. I didn't know what else to do. "Get your ass moving."

His shrug was infinitesimal, and his gaze was distant. "You would be better off without me."

"No." I laced my fingers behind his neck and pulled him in until we were practically forehead-to-forehead, hooking him in place so he was forced to look me right in the eye. "We got into this together. We get out together, or we go down together."

His eyes searched mine, and softened a little around the edges. "Stubborn," he murmured.

I smiled at him and didn't move away. _Stupid, stupid, stupid._ "Takes one to know one."

Valen's laugh was mere puff of air against my cheek. "True." His eyes drifted, then widened in alarm. "Watch out!" he barked, and hurled me to one side.

Too surprised to react gracefully, I hit the ground in a messy roll-skid-sprawl. Scales scraped across broken glass with a musical tinkling and a nails-on-chalkboard screech. Behind me, there was a scream, a crash, and a gurgle. Then silence.

The world stopped moving, or stopped moving quite so much. I twisted and lurched to my feet. "What-" The question died in my throat, answered by the bloody sight in front of me. "You."

Heurodis lifted her head as if it weighed more than Undrentide itself. She was impaled on one of the broken glass columns of the mythallar. "Priestess," the medusa greeted me, her voice echoing sibilantly. "I have been expecting you."

Judging by his combat-ready stance and the red glow of his eyes, Valen had been the one to throw her onto that column, no doubt as soon as he'd thrown me out of harm's way. "Vanish her, Rebecca." His voice was tight as a noose. "Imagine her dead, imagine her gone. Quickly."

I didn't listen. In my head, I heard Drogan begging, crying, dying. In my head, I saw Xanos lying on the glass amidst streaks of blood and ash, saw corpses rotting in the desert, saw Blumberg burning and heard J'Nah's death rattle. This dream was turning out to be a lesson in hate – in what I hated, and who, and why, and how very, very much hate my heart could hold.

Suddenly, it wasn't enough to see Heurodis vanish. I wanted to see her die. Again. And again. And again. And if I could see the black eyes of the illithid in hers, just before the light went out of them, so much the better. They owed me a debt of pain, and I was of a mind to collect.

I stalked across the dying city to my old nemesis. My boots crunched on broken glass. The medusa's power-blinded head turned to watch me come. She smiled, dribbling bloody phlegm. "You have changed, Priestess. No longer a child, are you? No. Your eyes have seen…too much." Her laugh rasped and bubbled in her throat. "Pain...is an instructive teacher. I am glad..to have contributed…to your evolution."

I stopped and looked down at her. She looked frail. Broken. How had I ever been afraid of her? I could reach out right now and burst every blood vessel in her head, strike her down with lightning and blow her ashes so far and wide that not even the gods would ever be able to bring her back. "Hey, Heurodis. You haven't changed a bit," I answered, and grinned malevolently. Overhead, storm clouds gathered. "Oh. That's right. It's because you're dead, isn't it?"

Valen's voice broke in. "Rebecca. This is a trick. Do not let it draw you in."

I didn't listen. This was only a dream – an endless, terrible dream, but still a dream. You could suffer in dreams, but you couldn't get hurt, you couldn't die, and it felt good to see the pain and fear in Heurodis' eyes, especially after all the pain I'd just been put through. I wanted to enjoy it a little longer.

Heurodis was breathing shallowly, and her voice was getting faint. Her fingers twitched, as if to beckon. "Come closer. I wish…to see…the one who defeated me. One last time."

This was only a dream. What could she do? I watched her with pleasant malice. "You aren't going to win this," I told her, though I meant it for the Elder Brain, too. "I beat you before. I'll kill you a thousand times again, if I have to."

Heurodis gave me a blood-kissed smile. "Your words display…a lack of understanding…thrall." Her hand – the far one, the one she'd held concealed on the other side of her hip - came up, holding a dagger. Then she stabbed me in the chest.

The impact drove me back a step. I stared down at the dagger's hilt in disbelief. "But…but it's a dream." My protest was weak. You couldn't get hurt in dreams. You dropped, but you never hit the ground. You ran, but they never caught you. The knife fell, but it never cut you. This wasn't how dreams were supposed to work.

Pain hit me. My knees buckled.

 _Then again, I could be wrong._

Heurodis laughed, a bubbling kind of laugh that had tentacles in it. "Fool," she rasped. She placed the flats of her hands on either side of her hips and pushed herself up. The broken pillar moved through her with a sucking, scraping sound, and then, with a final jerk, she was free and standing upright. The hole in her guts was leaking freely. She ignored it and looked at me with depthless black eyes. "We have told you again and again. Thought is the only reality. This is thought. It is real. When will you lea-"

Whatever her/its question was, it was lost in a rattle, a whoosh, and a loud, wet crack and a short, sharp splatter.

I stared dumbly at the big, spiky black flail head sitting in the pile of mush where the medusa's head used to be. I watched as the last of her snakes flopped and rattled and hissed and died. Then I watched as Valen whipped his weapon away, absent-mindedly shaking brains and skull fragments from it like he did this kind of thing all the time – which, come to think of it, he did. "Come back from that, berk," he spat at the corpse. Then his eyes went to me, and the red in them flooded out like the tide, to reveal bright and worried blue. " _Shit_. Rebecca."

It must have been bad, if it got Valen to curse. I peered down at the knife sticking out of my chest. "Not _again_ ," I complained, to nobody in particular. Then my legs gave out.

The tiefling caught me before I hit the ground, and eased me down the rest of the way, shifting his hands up as he lowered me until he was cradling my head. "Easy," he said softly. His eyes scanned me. Their corners were crinkled, but not with laughter. Not this time. "Hold still. Save your breath."

I'd just wasted my breath – maybe my life. I'd fallen for the oldest trick in the book. I had to laugh. Why not? It was funny. "Hah." I had to stop to catch my breath and blink spots away from my eyes, because laughing hurt. "Hoist…by my own…petard." I giggled. It gurgled. "And by petard…I mean ego."

Valen shook his head, his face screwed up and tight with worry. "Damn it, Rebecca. What is wrong with killing your enemies?" He went for my belt. I felt a lot of lifting and tugging as he tore through my pouches. "Why must you always taunt them first?"

It was hard to catch my breath, and words only came out in fragments. "…pissed m'off."

Valen found a little blue vial and popped the cork. "Remind me never to make you angry." He leaned forward. "Speaking of which, I have a question for you."

I gazed up at him. He was framed in sunlight and blue skies, and kind of blurry, so that if I squinted, his horns almost looked like a halo. _Hey, whaddya know. He really is an angel._ "Hmm?"

"What is your favorite color?"

A lock of his hair was dangling a few inches away from my nose. I smiled at it dreamily. "Re-" He grabbed the dagger and yanked it out of my chest. My body arched like a bow and I let out a primal scream. "MOTHERFUCKER!"

Valen held me down by planting a forearm across my shoulders and leaning most of his weight on it. Also, while I was still screaming, he took the opportunity to pour the healing potion right into my open mouth. Then he grabbed my jaw in one hand and held it shut until I swallowed. "Sorry, sorry, so sorry," he murmured. "This will make it better, I swear."

It didn't. Even after I stopped spluttering and caught my breath, the pain in my chest had gone away, but everything else was just the same. The sky was still spinning slowly above me as the last flickers of magic went out of the mythallar. We were still caught in this nightmare. I lifted my hand, and saw blood. "Why did that hurt so much?" I asked. The pain was a fading memory, but it had felt so real. "This is a dream." A quaver of pleading entered my voice. "Isn't it?"

Valen's voice was grave and soft. "It is, and it is not, I think." Satisfied that I was okay and wasn't going to jump up and run off the edge of the city, he sat back on his heels, his tail coiling around his haunches. "I think…I think that belief has the power to shape reality, in certain places, and if it can do so in the Outer Planes, why not in our innermost thoughts?" He shrugged. "And we are real, if nothing else. Our thoughts are real. Which makes this…real. In a way. In all the ways that matter, anyway."

My brain broke, my brief spark of hope died, and just like that, I was done. Just…done. My head fell back. It made a hollow sound when it hit the ground. Somehow, that seemed fitting. "We're never getting out of here."

Valen shook his head. "I will not accept that. There must be a way."

It was obviously his turn to give the pep talk, and under other circumstances I might have been grateful, but under these I just wished he would stop. The sheer pointlessness of it just made me angrier. "What way?" I asked bitterly. "There is no way. We're stuck."

He leaned forward, his blue eyes bright with urgency. "Stop and think about it. How did you get out of here the first time?"

I went very still. Then I closed my eyes and let out a long, defeated sigh. _Why lie? We'll be dead soon, anyway._ "I didn't."

Valen went still, too. "What?"

My temper flared. I lifted my head. "What are you, deaf? I said 'I didn't'. "

His eyes searched my face, confused and a little annoyed, as if I'd given him a riddle he couldn't answer. "What happened?"

I snapped. "I died, okay?!" I yelled. "I died in this fucking place. I went down with the city, I died, and Deekin died, and Xanos died…" Words died, strangled by rising hysteria. I couldn't save them, in the end. I couldn't even save myself. And now, it was happening all over again. I covered my face with both hands. "I don't even know how I came back!" Fever-dream images twisted through my head – a hooded figure, a door, a tree, and…nothing. So much nothing. The memories were like thumbscrews, and the words tore out of me. "I'm sorry. I failed. I'm a shit savior."

Gently, Valen pulled my hands away from my face and brushed his fingers against my cheek. Soft as his touch was, though, his voice was as sharp as a broken mythallar. " _Enough_. You are far from a failure, and self-pity ill becomes you. Snap out of it."

I went rigid with shock and stared up at him, open-mouthed. I wondered if I was bleeding again. If I wasn't, I should have been. "Wow. _Rude_."

The ground tilted. Valen threw one arm around a handy column. The other arm, he threw around me, effectively gluing me to his side. "You can skin me for my rudeness later," he said through gritted teeth. "Act now."

I felt like I'd just gotten dunked in an icy lake, but it wasn't actually all bad, because once the shock had passed I found my head had cleared. Valen's little verbal bitchslap had temporarily knocked all of the despair out of me.

Unfortunately, my clear thinking led me back to the same place as the muddy. Enserric was trying his best, but it wasn't good enough. We were doing our best, but the Elder Brain was bigger, stronger, and nastier than either of us.

The fucking thing was winning, and I was all out of ideas.

 _I need help_ , I thought, and I started crying again, but quietly, the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes and down my temples to dampen my hair. _Please. I need you, Shaundakul. We need you. I'm running blind. I need a signpost. A clue. Something. Anything_. I was a Blumenthal, gods damn it, and Blumenthals never begged, but I was all out of everything, including pride. _Please._ Then I closed my eyes and braced myself for whatever came – and if it was a long fall and a swift end, so be it.

Then the world went pleasantly cool and dim, like a cloud had just passed over the sun, or the edge of a cloak had just been swept over me to shield me from the rain, and I smelled crushed grass and cool earth and trees, and something was different, somehow.

A voice, one that ran through me deeper than bone-deep, spoke. It sounded exasperated. "Much as I treasure your independence, child of mine, there are times when I wish you would treasure it less. Must you always wait until you are on death's doorstep to ask for my help?"

My eyes flew open. A blur of green and brown and pale blue resolved itself in a forest canopy. There was a dark shape between me and it. I blinked again, and the shape became a familiar face – wolfish, stern, amused, with eyes of every color of every sky everywhere. My heart leapt and dropped at the same time. _It can't be._ I searched my god's eyes, now stormy and now limpid, now gray and now blue, now cold and now warm, as vast and changeable as the winds. _It can't be. It's another trick._ "Is that really you?" I whispered.

Shaundakul smiled at me and answered my question with a question. "What do you think, daughter of mine?"

My breath left me at once, and I cried out – from relief or grief, I couldn't say. "It is you." Only he could be this much of a pain in the ass at a time like this. Before I knew it, I was scrabbling upright and hurling myself into his arms, weeping like a child. He was here. I was safe. "Thank god."

Cloaked arms enfolded me, and a laugh rumbled in my ears like distant thunder. "You are welcome."

Metal screeched and leather creaked. "Who is this?" Valen demanded. Then: "No. Forget I said that. It was a stupid question." A foot scraped behind me. "Rebecca. Are you sure this is…" He paused again. "…who you think it is?"

I scrubbed my cheeks and sniffled back an embarrassing quantity of mucus before I turned to look at Valen. He was standing, almost in arm's reach. He looked okay, if bewildered. I couldn't blame him. "Yes," I answered simply. I could feel the power in me unspool and reach out to Shaundakul, like calling to like. I could feel him, a sense of presence that I knew in a way that went beyond mere knowing. I could feel it in my soul. "It's him."

Valen shot Shaundakul a wary scowl and stepped a little closer to me, his hand on his weapon's hilt for whatever good it might do. "If you are certain…"

It was him. I had to believe it was him. "I am." I twisted around and looked at Shaundakul and reached up and touched his grizzled cheek. "Glad you could make it, old man."

Shaundakul returned my smile and my touch. His fingers burned like holy fire where they brushed my cheek. "Make it? I have never left you, child. I am always here, and have always been here, and shall always be here."

I growl-sighed a little and shook my head at him. "You know what I mean."

"Yes." Shaundakul laughed. "I always do."

Valen had relaxed enough to take his eyes off of Shaundakul and case the joint a little, although our change of venue didn't seem to bring him any peace of mind. "Where are we?" he asked. He took two swift steps, turned, and looked up and around at the surrounding trees, his eyes trying to pierce every shadow. "What is this place?"

I didn't know, but that was okay, because Shaundakul answered. "We are in the place in my daughter's mind where I reside." His eyes were as blue and calm as the sea. "A sanctuary, of a sort."

I frowned. We were in an evergreen glade, cool and shady and breezy. The air smelled like pine needles and damp earth. There was a moss-covered stone in the middle of the glade, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. I knew, without knowing how I knew, that the stone would be good to sit on, and that there was a stream of clean water not too far distant, and that that white pine over there offered an excellent perch, sweet-smelling and sheltered and secure, from which I could watch the world go by with bird-sharp eyes. "I know this place," I said slowly. I'd seen it before, in dreams both waking and sleeping.

Shaundakul gave me a bemused look, as if I'd just stated the obvious. "Of course you do. You made it."

"You didn't?"

Shaundakul laughed at me, but gently. "No. Your mind is your own. I merely occupy the space you have made for me."

"Yeah," I returned drily. "Kind of like a stray cat who found the porch door open and came right in and made himself at home."

"I have always belonged here, my daughter – even if you have not always recognized that truth."

Valen frowned, then shook his head, as if he didn't understand what we were talking about and had given up on trying. "Are you saying that we are safe here?"

Instinct prompted my answer. "We are." I felt it, sure as the tide. I felt calm here – centered, as if I finally knew my place in the world again and had solid ground under my feet. "Until the Elder Brain takes over my mind, anyway," I added.

Valen still hadn't taken his hand from his weapon, and he stopped surveying the glade long enough to give me a gloomy frown. "I do not find that reassuring."

I snorted. "You and me both." I hesitated. Both of them were looking at me, in a way that made the remnant of my well-bred manners sit up and wave frantically. I cleared my throat, suddenly gruff. "I suppose I should make the official introductions." I gestured. "Valen, Shaundakul. Shaundakul, Valen."

Shaundakul subjected Valen to a long, measuring stare, then inclined his head. "Young man."

Valen returned Shaundakul's stare, with interest. "Are you truly a god?"

My god's tone was bland, but his eyes danced. "An unbeliever, hmm?"

Valen shrugged without taking his eyes off of Shaundakul. "Faith is for Primes. I am a Planar. I know that the Powers are fallible, and see nothing to gain in placing so much trust in them. The Astral is littered with the corpses of dead gods, and history is riddled with stories of the gods' short-sightedness." He smiled thinly. "Take Aoskar. He challenged the Lady of Pain - on her own turf, no less – and for that, she ended him."

Shaundakul's eyes swirled gray. "Yes. I know the limits of power – better than you think."

Valen gave my god a curious look. "Do you?"

My god's eyes darkened. "Ask my daughter what I know of loss, if you truly wish to understand."

Valen hesitated, then nodded. "I shall." His eyes flashed a challenge. "But you will forgive me if I do not place the same faith in you that she does."

Shaundakul laughed softly. "I would expect no less." He cocked his head, considering the tiefling with amused curiosity, as if Valen hadn't just insulted him on several levels simultaneously. Then again, I had tried to kill him the second time I met him and he'd still offered me a job, so it wasn't like Shaundakul was easy to offend. "A question for you, however. If you will."

Valen's face was unwelcoming, but not hostile. "If you must."

"Where do you place your faith, if not in the gods?"

"In my weapon, and my skill in battle." Valen touched the hilt of his flail. "In my own eyes and ears." His face softened, and he glanced at me. "In those I care for, and those who care for me."

Shaundakul dipped his head in acknowledgement. "A fair answer." A smile flickered about his mouth and in his eyes. "I shall not dispute it." He turned to me, his face going serious. "Now. You have asked for my guidance, daughter mine, and you shall have it, for this path you are on is a tangled one indeed. What is it that you need?"

I blinked at the abrupt end to their discussion – it had been kind of fun to see someone else on the opposite end of Shaundakul's Socratic needling, for once – but recovered soon enough. "I need to get to the Elder Brain and make it let us go."

Shaundakul laughed at me. "Then go to it." Briskly, he tapped my forehead with a forefinger. "What is keeping you, child? You know the way."

I scowled and rubbed my forehead with my fingertips. "Yeah, I really should have expected that kind of answer," I conceded sourly.

Shaundakul lifted his silver eyebrows. "Then why ask the question if you knew the answer?"

"I thought maybe I could surprise a straight answer out of you, for once."

Shaundakul smirked at me. "Then I commend your persistence, if not your wisdom."

I grunted none-too-gratefully. "Thanks." Valen was watching us, silent but attentive, and when I looked at him he gave me an encouraging half-smile, though he also kept one eye on Shaundakul. I went red and looked down again. "All right. Let me think."

I thought.

We were treading trodden trails, that was true – revisiting old memories, sometimes voluntarily but mostly not. Enserric had said that we needed to find a weak spot in the Elder Brain's net, but the net was so complex and multilayered that every time we slipped through one hole, we just sank into another.

What we needed, more than anything, was a way to slice the net – something to sever the strands and blaze a new trail through it, an avenue of escape that was broad and deep enough that this net couldn't reform fast enough to catch us.

My fingers froze in mid-rub, and I stared at the ground between my feet, hardly daring to breathe just in case my breath might break the fragile little seedling of an idea that had just sprouted in my head. "We've been going through the doors the Elder Brain made." I looked up, an incredulous smile spreading across my face. I snapped my fingers and pointed at Shaundakul. "That's it!" I shouted. "It's like Halaster's maze. We can't use the doors this thing has made, 'cause they'll just put us where it wants, not where we want. We need to make a new door." Then I frowned. "Wait. _How_ do I make a new door?"

Shaundakul smiled at me, and it was like getting bathed in a sudden sunbeam and soothed by the shade under an old oak tree, all at once. "It is the simplest of matters, once you know how to do it."

It didn't seem so simple to me. "Will you show me?"

Shaundakul nodded gravely. "I will show you." He drew his sword and held it out to me, hilt-first. The sword's shadow streamed long and black over the mountainside. "Hold out your hands, Rebecca."

I stared at his sword. I'd never really looked at it before, but now I was looking at it, and it was the same depthless black of the ocean at night, with occasional flickers in it, like the reflections of strange and distant stars. I had never really looked at it before, but now that I did, it seemed…familiar. I licked my lips nervously. "Why? I have a weapon. I don't need yours."

Shaundakul inclined his head. "You have a weapon, yes – but you do not accept it."

I felt like crying, but I was all cried out, and my eyes stayed dry. "It's not what I wanted."

Shaundakul's voice was as gentle as a breeze, and as persistent. "It is what you are." He smiled, serene and reassuring. "Do not fear your nature, child. It is not the weapon which is evil, but the uses to which it is put."

I remembered a glowing brand, showing a sword – or maybe a lightning bolt - held in a clenched fist, and I felt Enserric's presence in the back of my mind, a wickedly sharp splinter that should have hurt but instead had slipped into my head so painlessly and smoothly it was as if there had already been a space for it there.

I bowed my head, then nodded and took a deep, long breath. I wished it wasn't so, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride – and now was no time for scruples. This was win or lose, live or die, and I no longer much cared about the means, as long as they led to the right end. "If you're wrong and I die, I'm going to spend my whole afterlife calling you names," I warned.

Shaundakul's smile widened. "I would not have it otherwise, my dear."

"Right." I straightened. "Well, just so we're clear." Then I took my weapon from Shaundakul's hands.

As soon as our fingertips touched, the sword changed, and then I was holding Enserric, in all his black glass and scarlet glitter. I held him up in front of my face. "Enserric," I greeted him simply, because there was really nothing more to be said.

The sword gleamed, the crimson sparkles multiplying and merging until they almost swallowed the black. "Wielder. Is it killing time?"

I smiled mirthlessly. "Soon," I promised. I looked at Shaundakul, and he gave me a slow nod of encouragement, but offered nothing more. That was no surprise. The gods helped those who help themselves, and I'd probably resent the shit out of him if it was any other way. I stared at Enserric, then bowed my head. _If this is what I am, then so be it, because I'm too tired to keep running from thi_ s.

Then I reached down into the power beneath my heart and drew it up and let the current run into the icy river that connected me to Enserric.

The shock of the joining made me jerk and gasp like I'd plunged into that river myself. My vision went strange – dark, then doubled, and then dancing with red sparkles…

…and then, all at once, the world snapped into focus again, only now I was looking out at it through the facets of a crystalline cage, and in the same instant I felt that crystal cage slam into place around my mind, and suddenly I could see clearly for what felt like the first time in forever.

Slowly, I lowered the sword and turned, my lips parted as I saw the world through Enserric's eyes. The world around me was rippled, distorted, as if it wasn't quite there. The sky had taken on strange colors, and the world was bleeding together, valley and mountain and river and trees, running like ink down a drain.

I lowered my eyes and looked at Shaundakul and Valen. In a world that had suddenly turned into a combination of a bad acid trip and a Dali painting, they were two points of stability. I could feel them grounding me, even as the waves of unreality tried to sweep me away. I looked at Valen and smiled. "You're real," I said.

Hesitantly, he smiled back. "Should I not be?"

I shook my head. "No. It's good. You should be." I felt like I was standing in some cold, dark current. I could feel it yanking at my soul, trying to drag me under, but as long as I had something real to hold on to, just one true thing in this ocean of lies, I thought I'd be okay.

Shaundakul stepped to my side. "Do you see it?" he asked. "Do you see the door?"

I looked up, scanning the sky. "What am I looking for?"

"The point where reality meets unreality. A warp in the weft." Shaundakul grinned like a wolf. "A portal."

I squinted. "I don't see it."

Shaundakul tsk'ed and rapped my forehead again. "That is because you are not using the eyes your god gave you."

He had a point. I grumbled a little, but blinked into my second sight, and there, at last, it was - a patch of sky that flickered and pulsed, so much heavier and denser and more there than anything else that it warped the world around it. It looked the way I thought a black hole might look. "Oh. Now I see it."

Shaundakul nodded. "Good. Now open it."

I frowned. "How?"

My god moved to stand behind me. He gestured for me to lift Enserric, and when I did, he reached around my shoulders and covered my hands with his own. "I will show you," he said, and together, we set the sword's point against the sky and began to draw a line.

The sword's tip opened up a thin red laceration. Light spilled through, and the world convulsed. There was a far-off scream – definitely not a happy one. I staggered. Shaundakul steadied me. "Keep going," he said. "Quickly, now. Your enemy will not tolerate this for long."

I nodded and set my teeth and kept going. Enserric's tip dragged, as if meeting some resistance, and even with Shaundakul helping me it took all of my strength to keep it moving, to keep extending the line.

My arms shook with exhaustion. The line lengthened, then turned, then turned again. _A doorway_ , I thought. We were carving a doorway. In what, exactly, I didn't know, but it was working so I decided not to question it.

Another turn, this one harder than the others and carved with an irate scream echoing in my head, and at last the tip of the sword reached the beginning of the first cut, and a piece of the sky peeled away like paper, vanishing to wisps as it fell.

I stared. Space and distance had distorted as I opened the door, and now the door was no longer in the sky but was just a step away. It opened onto a place that was red and gray and pulsing. Sparks shot across it in irregular rhythms. "What is that?"

Shaundakul released me and stepped back. "A path you have yet to travel," he answered simply, and gathered his cloak around him. "I would hurry, if I were you," he added, as the world quivered like a giant Jell-O mould. "You have wounded it. If you give it time, it will heal the gap, and the next door will be harder to open."

I didn't think I could open another of those portals, period. My arms already felt like lead. "I'm on it." I turned to Valen, who'd been standing by all this time, watching and waiting with a patience I'd seldom seen from him. "Ready to go?"

Valen studied the door. "So you can open portals," he mused. His smile was faint, but there. "Shall we call you Planewalker as well as Windwalker?"

I waved a dismissive hand. "It's not a real portal."

The tiefling arched one eyebrow. "Is it not?"

This was a hell of a time to get philosophical. "Does it matter?"

Valen paused, then shrugged. "I suppose not." He eyed the portal, then stepped to my side. "I am ready. On your word, we go."

I nodded and took a deep breath. I didn't need to ask Enserric if he was ready. I could feel his hunger in the back of my mind. It echoed my own. The Elder Brain had tormented us for too long. It was its turn to suffer. I turned to Shaundakul. "Thanks," I said simply. "As always."

Shaundakul touched his forehead in a solemn salute. "Strike swiftly, strike hard, and show no mercy, my falcon."

I grinned grimly. "Mercy's the last thing on my mind." Then I turned and took Valen's hand, and with the world bleeding down all around us, we stepped through the portal, into…

 _shift_

My feet sank into something squishy and kind of slippery. I stumbled. An arm went around my shoulder. "Steady," Valen's voice murmured in my ear, but I didn't answer. I was too busy gawking.

We'd been to a lot of strange places in this nightmare, but this last one really took the cake.

There were strange shapes all around us, traced in pink and gray and white and red. They were like elongated stars, or maybe comets, or maybe trees – bulbous shapes with long, many-forked branches and long, slender trunks ending in reaching roots. Each pair ran head-to-tail, and altogether they formed a web that stretched off into a seemingly infinite distance.

The light was flickering, but bright. It didn't take long to see why. Sparks were firing in the junctures of the web, where the trees met, root to branch, and while none of them were very bright, combined, they made enough light for even me to see by.

Red light rippled along Enserric's edge. "Neurons!" he said excitedly. "Wielder! Do you realize where we are? This is the Elder Brain's…er, well, brain." The sword's voice lowered to a mutter. "Bugger. That sounded better in my head."

Valen spoke, his voice half-wondering and half-wary. "We are in the Elder Brain? How is that possible?"

As if in response, the neuron we were standing on shook, and a voice like a million voices rose in a wave. YES. A GOOD QUESTION, THRALL. HOW ARE YOU HERE?

I shrugged. "We broke in. You really should hire better security." Valen laughed. It was a harsh laugh, and dark as sin, but a laugh it was.

The voice was not amused. AN OVERSIGHT. IT WILL BE CORRECTED. The wave rose like a typhoon…

…and broke, foaming and then falling against the cage that Enserric's unliving mind had erected around my living one.

The waves of thought surged around me. I watched them, amazed. _It doesn't hurt._ Why didn't I hurt?

 _Well, of course it cannot reach us_ , Enserric said, or I thought, or maybe it was both. _Our mind is both living and dead. It hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with us._

I stared. We were right. I could remember our death – the pain just a passing insult compared to the cold and yawning emptiness that had tried to consume us, and both of those trivial compared to the feeling of our soul sliding down the sword's icy gullet, and the frantic terror as we tried to hold on to some remnant of ourselves even as the glass-sharp cold tried to shred us to pieces, and then…

 _Yes, and then the indignity of being forced to watch rats gnaw my fingers off and pup their revolting offspring in my brainpan_ , Enserric put in huffily. _Have you tried watching your own corpse rot? It is a singularly disturbing experience._

I blinked owlishly. I remembered the rats. The memory was fuzzy and distant, like it had arrived secondhand, but it was there. _I…think I kind of have._

 _I know._ Enserric sighed. _Bloody confusing in here all of a sudden, isn't it?_

 _No fucking kidding._ And that was not in the least because there was another mind in the cage with us, and it had no memory of cold, but it did remember fire, and it was seething.

I turned. Valen's baby blues met mine. They were lucid, albeit a little perplexed. "What is this about the rats?" the tiefling asked.

I had to laugh. _That's right._ I'd dragged his mind along for this ride, and while it had caused him a whole heaping helping of pain, now it was protecting him. I felt a crazy joy at the thought. So often I'd been the storm. It felt good to be somebody's shelter, for once. "Just some bad memories, that's all."

Valen put his head to one side, and I could feel him weighing that statement. "Ah," he said at last. "Well. We know what those are like."

We did. I watched electricity flow across the Elder Brain's synapses, and I smiled. It was not a nice smile. I wasn't feeling very nice. "Hey, sunshine?"

Valen turned to look at me. Curiosity flooded my own synapses, and amusement, and something that felt hot and coiled and red. It didn't feel very nice, either. It felt a lot like chained-up bloodlust. I could relate. "Yes, my lady?"

I lifted Enserric. "Wanna fuck shit up?"

Valen considered that. Then he grinned. His eyes shone red. "I would love to."

I smiled beatifically. "That's what I thought." I pointed. "You take that branch, I'll take this one."

Valen nodded. "On it," he said, and then he leapt, the power in his leap carrying him clear across the nearest synapse. He hit the ground running, his flail already humming through the air. Where it hit, it tore chunks out of the Elder Brain's neurons. Long coils of cellular goo streamed lazily from the ruptures, floating into empty space while the voices screamed in protest.

I waited long enough to see the tiefling move, then nodded, turned, and reached out with my second sight and sixth sense, calling to the lightning leaping across the nearest synapse and making it surge.

Sparks showered, then spurted. The long feelers that bridged the gap between neurons blackened and withered.

The Elder Brain howled. STOP! STOP, OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED!

Valen paused, lowering his flail. "We have been punished," he growled. "And punished, and punished, and punished again. Nothing you can do to us can be worse than what we have already suffered."

The voices lashed out, a near-physical force. YOU HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED A FRACTION OF THE PAIN WE CAN GIVE YOU.

The tiefling clucked his tongue. "Now, now. Threats hurt." He lifted his flail again and grinned like a tiger. "But so does Abyssal steel." Then he whipped his flail above his head and tore a new hole in the Elder Brain's neural circuitry.

I stared at Valen, open-mouthed. _Dayum, son._ I couldn't decide whether to hold him back, cheer him on, or fuck him. All three would have to wait, though, because there was pain to be dealt, and for once, we weren't the target.

There was an undamaged neuron to my right. I turned, gathered myself, and jumped, gathering air to propel me. The brain matter was squishy, and I stumbled when I landed, but I solved that problem by plunging Enserric into a neuron to catch my fall. Goo splattered me. It was hot and briny and bitter-tasting. I paused to spit it out, wipe my face with the back of my hand, and yank Enserric free. Then I did it again, and again, and again.

The Elder Brain's many voices babbled and screamed as the tiefling and I savaged its mind. By the third neuron, the babble coalesced into coherent speech. NO! STOP! IT HURTS! More neurons were shriveling, the damage spreading. The voices groaned. WE WILL SPEAK, WE WILL COMPLY, ONLY YOU MUST STOP!

I lowered Enserric. Valen did the same with Devil's Bane. "All right," I said. "We're stopping. Start talking."

The voices gathered, fell, swirled around us, though this time they kept a wary distance. WHAT ARE YOU?

"Who, me?" I looked down at Enserric, glittering like a bloody black claw. Then I looked up and laughed. My teeth gleamed in the light of dying brain cells. "I'm the wrath of God." And, as wrong as it felt to say that, it also felt entirely right. _God help me._

A million voices rioted in the background, while a million more spoke in icy unison. VERY WELL. WHAT DO YOU WISH OF US, WRATH?

I thought. "I want you to let us go. All of us."

Valen chimed in grimly. "Unharmed."

The sliver in my head twitched, then rather peremptorily shoved me aside and took over my vocal cords. "Yes – physically and mentally, if you please," Enserric chimed in, through me. "From now unto perpetuity, as I know the illithid have very long memories."

I scowled and wrested my body back. "Cut that out." A mute and only half-sincere sense of apology filled my head. They were followed by a flood of words in Enserric's prissy mind-voice, delivered like a script and accompanied by a foot-tapping kind of impatience. I sighed. "And with no retaliation against us or anyone connected to us, by you or your people or your thralls," I added reluctantly, on Enserric's inner prompting.

The voices conferred for a while, a million million separate arguments all being hashed out at once. Eventually, the arguing died down and the voices came back together into the single overarching voice. AND IF WE DO THIS, YOU WILL LEAVE? it asked hopefully.

It looked like we were winning, but despite what satisfaction there was in having caused this thing a little pain in return for the pain it had given us, our victory tasted bitter. Bad enough to think of what this little venture had cost us. I felt raw and filthy, like my brain had been scoured with raw sewage, and I had no doubt that Valen felt the same. I was pretty sure we'd both be having nightmares for a long time to come.

Worse, though, was the prospect of walking away empty-handed. I had a memory, although it felt like it came from another lifetime, of another negotiation – the one that had gotten us roped into this nightmare to start with. That one had failed. Without much hope, I tried one last time. "What about the alliance with the Valsharess?"

The voices gibbered. IMPOSSIBLE. ONLY THE MIRROR WILL MOVE THE ELDER CONCORDE.

Valen's voice was flat and cold. "We could destroy you." His eyes flickered red, and his grin was a touch feral. "Your grip on our minds is loosening. I can feel it. Without that, you are nothing, and once I am free, I think it would take very little for me to tear you apart."

PERHAPS. There was fear in the voices. WE MIGHT CEASE AT YOUR HAND. BUT OUR DEATH CHANGES NOTHING. ZORVAK'MUR CANNOT BREAK THE ALLIANCE ALONE. EVEN IF WE FALL, THE CONCORDE WILL SURVIVE, AND THE ACCORD WILL STAND.

I bowed my head. So we suffered all of this for nothing. And if victory had been bitter, it was nothing next to the taste of failure.

Somehow, Valen had found his way back to my side. I no longer questioned how. I was just glad he was there. His hand touched mine. "There is no dishonor in retreat, if it means living to fight another day," he murmured to me. His face was cold, his eyes were hot, and his voice was tired. "I think we should say yes, and end this."

He was right. I blew out a shaky, defeated breath. Then I nodded. "All right." I raised my voice. "All right, Zorvak'mur, or whatever you want to call yourself. If you honor your end of the bargain, as described, we'll leave."

The voices babbled eagerly. YOU WILL LEAVE? AND NEVER RETURN?

I wondered if this thing had been talking to my exes. Not since Robert had anybody been so happy to see the last of me. "We will."

Sparks flared. Neurons pulsed. THEN GO, howled the Elder Brain, and…

…and then nothing much happened, except that suddenly there was cool air on my cheek, and a voice screeching at me. "Boss! Hey!" Clawed fingers poked me. "What happened? Did it listen? We went and now we be back but you not even say anything all this time! Are you okay?" Poke, poke. "Bo-oss!"

I blinked and drew in a sharp, harsh breath, like a diver surfacing from an oyster reef. The creepy whirling lines of Zorvak'mur's outer ring swam into blurry focus. Memory trickled in. I gasped and spun, searching through eyes that couldn't quite see, as if I'd just woken up from a long sleep. "Valen."

His silk-smoke voice answered immediately, breathless with relief. "Rebecca."

I spun, and there he was, and there I was, throwing my arms around his neck and hugging him so hard that our armor made a sound a sack of pennies being poured into a steel drum. "You're okay?"

He had gone stiff with shock, but before I could do more than register it, his arms had come up and locked into place around me and it was still like being hugged by a postbox, but in a good way. "I am…uninjured," he said roughly.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The slight quiver in his voice and his choice of words told me all I needed to know. He wasn't okay. Neither was I. I had a bad case of the shakes, the jitters, and the tremors, all rolled up in one great big bundle of mindfuck. I opened my eyes again and stared past a lock of crimson hair and, past that, the pointed tip of his ear. It was the one with the notch in it. It looked real enough, but… "Is this real?"

Valen's arms tightened around me, and his soft exhale stirred my hair. "I do not know," he admitted, and his voice was tired. "I can no longer tell."

Anxious claws tugged at my pants leg. "Hey! Deekin still waiting for an explanation! What the _kzzkt_ happened to you guys?"

Deekin's voice snapped me back to reality, or what passed for reality anymore. _Shit._ We were standing in the open in an illithid city. This was no time for a meltdown. I pushed away from Valen. My hand was already on Enserric's hilt. I didn't remember telling it to do that. I looked down at Deekin, feeling a flare of relief at seeing him hale and whole – if it really was him. If this really was me. "What happened in there?" I demanded, more harshly than I'd meant to. "What did you see?"

Deekin blinked up at me uncertainly. "Umm. Well, first we walks in, then you guys stops and stares for a while, then just when Deekin startings to get nervous, a mindflayer comes in and wiggles its tentacles and, poof! Here we be." He studied my face, his eyes intent and worried. "You be okay, Boss? Deekin only asking because, umm, you not look okay."

Valen's eyes had gained dark circles that hadn't been there before, and his expression was haunted. "How long were we in there?"

The kobold squinted in thought, then shook his head. "Not long." He gave me a reproachful look. "Just long enough for Deekin to get worried."

A voice came from behind my head. "There, do you see? It is as I said," Enserric put in primly. "The flow of thought is much faster than the flow of time in the outside world."

The sword didn't sound even slightly rattled. The icy sliver in the back of my head didn't feel rattled, either, though the implications of my knowing that sure as hell rattled me. It rattled me right into silence.

Valen looked at my face, shifted, and spoke into my silence. "At least there is that." He didn't sound so sure, himself. "At least we did not lose too much time."

I swallowed. "Yeah." I reached up to run a hand through my hair, and froze. The circlet. It wasn't there. _Shit. They still have it._

Deekin's head turned. He squeaked. "Boss!"

Valen was already moving in front of me, his eyes flashing red, and I spun, reaching in and out and around and feeling the icy river sluice through me and the crystal cage slam into place around my mind. "No further," I snapped at the illithid who'd been creeping up behind us. "I'm warning you." A wordless growl from Valen punctuated my words.

The illithid stopped and surveyed me – with its eyes and, a moment later, its mind. I felt it slither along the facets of my crystalline shelter, seeking a way in, but the cage of Enserric's undead awareness was as smooth as glass and impenetrable as diamond, and after a moment, the sensation withdraw. The illithid's tentacles writhed, and a voice like something from the depths of a swamp came gurgling out from beneath them. "You have been told to leave," it said, and even through the strangeness of its voice I could hear its distaste. "The Elder Brain has instructed us in the terms of your pact, but you should be aware that any delay in your departure may be taken as a violation of that pact."

My left knee threatened to buckle. I locked it. Sweat trickled down my back. So this is where I run away with my tail between my legs, before they change their minds. "We're going," I said shortly, and made to turn.

A poke to my thigh stopped me. "Psst. Hey. Boss." Deekin tried to keep one eye on the illithid and the other on me, with the net result that he looked like he was about to enter a trance and start speaking in tongues. "What about the slaves? And the circlet?"

I stopped in mid-stride. Then, very carefully, I put my foot down, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The slaves. I'd forgotten about them. How could I forget? I turned around again. "Yes." My voice came out hard and grim and cold. Was this why Valen sounded the way he did, sometimes? Carrying all that pain around with him, all those memories – it was no wonder he'd almost forgotten how to laugh. I was feeling pretty far removed from laughter, myself. "What about the slaves?" I went on. "They're mine. I paid for them. Them, and my circlet."

The illithid tilted its head. It appeared to be listening to words I couldn't hear. "The item was not part of our pact," it said at last.

I gritted my teeth, but Valen's warning glance at me told me not to push my luck, which was already stretched to its breaking point. "And the slaves?"

The illithid did that listening thing again. "We will deliver the thralls to the destination of your choosing," it conceded. "We will not allow it to be said that the illithid of Zorvak'mur do not abide by their mercantile agreements." Its tentacles twitched. "But you must leave now."

Valen and I exchanged glances. I bit my lip, thinking, then turned back to the illithid. "Send them to the Seer of Eilistraee, in Lith My'athar. Tell her they're a gift, to do with as she pleases." There was no guarantee the slaves would survive the trip, but I'd done all I could. Valen was right. I couldn't kill myself to save them. I could barely even save myself.

The illithid paused, then nodded minutely. "It will be done." Its voice hardened. "Now go. You will not be given another warning."

"Fine." I turned on my heel. I felt like a sculpture made of spun sugar, so fragile I'd shatter at a touch. "Come on. We're leaving." And I walked away without a backwards glance.

Quarra met us at the mouth of the cavern of Zorvak'mur. She sat her mount like it was a rock, not a living animal, which was an especially impressive feat when you considered that the rock in question was trying to lick its own eyeball, for reasons which probably only made sense to a lizard.

As soon as we were in close sight, her sharp eyes went right to my brow, where the circlet should have been, then settled on Valen's face, which looked like it had aged ten years in a day. Her eyes narrowed. "What happened?" she demanded, when we were in hearing range.

 _Don't pull the punch. You don't deserve it._ "We failed. They wouldn't deal."

Quarra frowned. "Explain."

Deekin eyed me. The little bard knew something was up, even if he didn't know exactly what. "Yeaaaah, Deekin not so sure explaining be a great idea right now."

Valen shook his head sharply. "Not here. We are exposed here." He reached my side, gave me a once-over, and jerked his head at her to follow. "At camp."

Quarra hesitated as if she wanted to argue, but in the end, she just saluted and spurred her mount and led us on.

The drow's hidey-hole was barely more than a crevice in the rock, but for once, I didn't care. Right then, a hole in the ground suited me just fine. Valen led the way in, his eyes red-hued and hunting for enemies like he was just hoping something would be dumb enough to try him right now. Quarra placed a glow-rock in a niche up the wall, shedding just enough light to keep me from walking into anything. Deekin rifled through his pack, muttering about food. I found a few feet of unobstructed stone and paced. Standing still wasn't an option. If I stopped moving, I started thinking.

A wave of red light washed over my shoulder. _Come, now_ , Enserric told me in exhorting tones. His voice was so clear, I might almost have thought he'd spoken out loud, except for the way it reverberated off the inside of my skull, for all the world like my own voice. _You are free and alive. What more could you want?_

What I wanted was to feel clean, and to feel like my mind and body were still my own. Enserric's voice was all sunshine and rainbows, but he didn't feel like sunshine. He felt dark and contracted. Worried. _Don't worry._ I felt a bubble of dark amusement rise up. _I won't fall on you and leave you to get picked up by some drow, if that's what's got you so concerned._ I had no intention of dying. Not yet. I hadn't started this war, but I'd be damned if I didn't finish it.

Enserric went black, then flared. _Fine. I was only trying to help, but if you prefer to be unreasonable, far be it from me to stop you_ , he huffed, and fell silent. I told myself that I was relieved. My pacing quickened.

A few feet away, the drow and the tiefling spoke softly. "The Elder Concorde demanded the Seer's mirror as a condition of breaking the alliance," Valen explained.

Quarra sucked in a breath through her teeth and clicked her tongue. "High price, that."

Valen's voice was flat. "Too high. We will not save this world from the Valsharess just to deliver it to the illithid."

"Speaking as somebody who lives in this world, I'll agree with that," Quarra muttered. Her lizard nipped her sleeve. She patted its snout absently. "We're leaving, then?"

"Yes. How are we for supplies?"

The scout didn't pause before answering. "Five cycles. Enough to get back with some spare, if we leave now."

I spun on my heel and walked back towards them, jingling with the force of my steps. "Good." I couldn't breathe in this cave. "Then let's go. Now."

Valen gave me a sharp look. "Are you certain you do not wish to rest?"

I wasn't in the least bit tired – not physically, anyway - and these walls were closing in on me anyway. "Yes." It came out grim and cold. I tried to soften it. "The more distance we put between us and that place, the better." I paused. I wasn't tired, but Valen looked almost haggard and I hadn't even asked him how he felt. I'd only been thinking about myself, as usual. Lois had been right. "Sorry." _I'm a selfish jerk. Sorry._ "Do you want to rest?"

Valen's face darkened. "No. You are right. It is best if we return as quickly as possible. The Seer must know of this, and I…" He trailed off. A hollow, hunted look appeared in his eyes. "I must speak with her." He took a deep breath and straightened, with bleak determination. "Lead on, Quarra."

The drow looked back and forth between us, then bowed and swung herself back onto her mount. "As you say, commander," she murmured, with unusual mildness. She buckled her harness and checked her weapons. "This way."

* * *

My chest hurt where Heurodis had stabbed me, but when I slipped my fingers beneath the collar of my coat, there was nothing there. Nothing but an old scar, too old to hurt the way it did.

I withdrew my hand, but my fingers still rubbed the spot. I couldn't help it. _Did that really happen, or did I just dream it?_ I remembered it all so vividly, but now it was like nothing had happened at all.

I took my hand away from my chest. It drifted back. My fingers played a nervous patter on my scales. My eyes darted at shadows and stone. _Is this real? Shaundakul help me, I can't even tell anymore._

I tried to be unobtrusive about my fidgeting, but Valen must have been keeping an eye on me, because he noticed. He shot me a look – sharp, questioning, a little worried, a silent, 'Are you all right?'. I tried to look away, but his eyes snagged mine and wouldn't let go, insisting on an answer to his unspoken question. I shook my head a little and flicked my eyes to the others. This wasn't the time or place to talk. After a second, Valen dipped his head in understanding and broke eye contact.

I relaxed. Then I rubbed my chest again. I couldn't help it. It was like tonguing a loose tooth.

Time ran together in the dark, the way it always seemed to. I followed where Quarra led. After a while, that turned out to be a cave.

We all filed in. Deekin lifted his head, blinking blearily. His nostrils twitched and his little fork tongue darted out between his teeth. "Huh. This be an old dragon's lair." His snout wrinkled. "Phew. Deekin knows that smell anywhere."

Quarra reined her lizard in and swung down, giving the kobold a surprised frown. "You have a good nose."

Deekin grinned. "Nah. Just a good memory. Old Boss was a dragon. Big. White. Smelly." He sniffed again. "Smellier'n this, that be for sure. If there be dragons here, it be a long time ago."

I remembered the pervasive aroma of freezer-burned beef and old farts in Tymofarrar's lair. "Don't remind me, Deeks. I've been trying to forget that smell for a while now."

"Sorry, Boss."

That made Quarra's eyebrows raise, but after a moment she shrugged, as if deciding she didn't really want to hear the whole story, anyway. "Well, you're right. This used to be a wyrm's lair. Nothing but bones now, but the stench is still there, so other beasts still steer clear of it." Her mount absently stepped on her foot. Just as absently, she elbowed it in the ribs. It blinked, snorted, and sat, whereupon she tied it to a handy rock and went about pulling packs and setting up camp. "Should be safe enough to rest a spell, and you lot look like you need it."

I didn't argue. Deekin was starting to droop, and even Valen was looking bushed. As for me… _nope. Not going there._

We settled in. Deekin almost immediately curled up against the wall, huddled so deep in his blankets that just the tip of his snout poked out. The poor little guy didn't even pull out his journal, he was so bushed. I sank down next to him and laid one hand on his skinny shoulder, feeling it rise and fall with his breath. He was so tiny. I always forgot how frail he really was, like a bird. _He's alive_ , I told myself. _They didn't get him. At least there's that._ My hand went to my chest again, rubbing.

Valen caught me at it. Again. He crossed to me and crouched down with a faint grimace. "What is wrong?"

I didn't want to talk about it. "I might ask the same of you." There was a tightness around his eyes, as if from pain. "Are you all right?"

He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug, winced, and lowered it. "These tunnels are chill and damp." Beneath his pauldron, he rolled his shoulder, a little too gingerly. "I ache."

I almost dipped into my second sight, and stopped myself at the last second. "Where?"

He snorted. "Where not?"

 _That's right._ I'd almost forgotten what I'd once seen in my second sight – that, underneath all that gear, he was a walking mass of scar tissue, and probably a pretty good barometer, in case anybody wanted to know whether it was about to rain. I winced. "Sorry."

Valen flicked his fingers dismissively. "Do not apologize. You had nothing to do with it." He gave me a penetrating stare. "And do not dodge the question."

My laugh had a quaver to it. "You don't give up easy, do you?"

He didn't laugh. "No. It is why I am still alive."

He was still alive because he had more heart, soul, and guts than he knew what to do with – and, after seeing some of the shit he'd been through, I found that I didn't have the heart to lie to him. "Fine. You wanna know? My chest hurts, or feels like it should, where…" I couldn't say it. "You know." I took my hand away from my chest, then clasped both hands in my lap. "But there's nothing there."

The tiefling's eyes softened in sympathy. "It was not real."

My hands twitched. I clasped them harder. "It felt real."

The weariness in Valen's face spoke volumes. "I know." A kind of despairing humor twisted his lips. "I was there." He studied my face. "You should rest."

"Me?" He looked like hell. "What about you?

Valen's face froze. "I…would rather not."

I remembered what he'd told me, back there, about being afraid to go to sleep when he first got out of the Abyss, for fear that he'd wake up in the midst of a nightmare and kill everybody around him before he came to his senses. "I know." I didn't want to think about how I knew, but I did. I'd been there, too. "But you're only human," I went on, trying to sound reasonable. "You won't make it the rest of the way without sleep."

Valen spluttered. "I am not only human." His hand went to one of his horns. "In case you have not noticed."

I waved a hand. "Eh. You're human. You can see in the dark and you've got…" I gestured vaguely at his head. "…you've got accessories that I don't have, but aside from that…"

He stared at me as if I'd grown an extra head, and it was even crazier than the first one. "Accessories?"

"Hsst." Quarra looked back. "Quiet."

I scowled at her, but not for long. My eyes slid back to Valen. Was it just me, or was he swaying a little? I jerked my head and patted the ground next to me. After a moment's hesitation, he gave in and sank down next to me, rather more slowly and less gracefully than usual. He didn't even argue. That had to be a bad sign. I'd never seen him this worn-out. I looked at Quarra again, then scootched close enough to Valen to whisper in his ear. "What can I do?"

He grunted. His eyes were a little bloodshot. "I do not suppose you can grant a dreamless sleep."

I gnawed my lower lip. "I have some powdered valerian root," I offered. "Found it in the market. I could brew you a tea to help you sleep. Add some willow bark, too, for the pain. That'll help."

He frowned at his hands. "Will I dream?"

"Maybe." I thought about it, and blew out a frustrated breath. "I don't know, to be honest with you."

Valen shook his head. "Then let us not risk it."

I strangled the urge to strangle him. "We need to do something."

He let his head fall back against the stone, closing his eyes. I had the feeling he was avoiding my eyes. "I can cope. Sleepless nights are nothing new to me."

Like hell was I going to let him martyr himself. "Bullshit."

Valen cracked one eye open and looked at the ground. "This must be real," he murmured.

If I had any laughter left in me, I would have laughed. "Yeah. No piles of shit."

"So I truly am this tired." Valen almost-laughed and let his eyes close again. "Hellfire. I was hoping that was just another hallucination."

"You and me both." I swallowed. My mouth felt dry. "There...might be another option."

Valen lifted his head a little and raised an eyebrow. "Which is?"

I didn't want to ask this question. Part of me still hoped that what had happened had just been some weird hallucination, but if I asked and he answered right, then I'd know it had all been real, and I wasn't sure how to feel about that. I glanced at Quarra and lowered my voice even further. "You…you remember what I did to that orc bouncer?"

Valen paused. Then, softly: "Yes."

My fingers trembled, then twined around each other, like the snakes in Heurodis's hair. "I could do the same thing to you." I had to stop and clear my throat and gather my nerve. "You'll be out like a light for a few hours, but you won't dream, either."

The tiefling's eyes went to one side, thoughtful. He frowned. His eyes cut back to me. "And in the meantime, I shall be useless to you all." He shook his head. "No. That is not a chance I am willing to take."

Time for some tough love. "You go much longer without sleep, you'll be useless no matter what. At least this way you'll be useless for less time."

Valen's lashes fluttered in surprise. "That was…blunt." He paused, then sighed. "But true."

I'd roughed him up. Now to be gentle. "It's okay." As okay as being unconscious in the Underdark could be, anyway. "We'll be fine." I snuck a glance at Quarra. She was setting up some kind of tripwire at the entrance to the cave. "Quarra knows what she's doing." I touched the pouch at my belt. "And I have lightning."

Valen's frown deepened. "You cannot see in the dark."

Enserric's drawling, prissy tenor chimed in. "Never fear. I can see for her."

I reached back and patted the sword. "Thanks." My voice was so bright, Deekin could have read even his handwriting by it. "See? No problem."

Valen stared at me and pressed his lips together in a way that said he saw plenty of problems with this idea, but after a long, drawn-out moment, he nodded. "Very well." His voice was almost leaden with weariness. "Do it."

It was a measure of his exhaustion that he was willing to let this happen, but I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. "All right," I said, and stood, reaching for my belt o' tricks.

We had little water to spare, and couldn't risk lighting a fire to heat it, but that was the advantage of powders – they would dissolve and make an effective tisane even in cold water. Thank you, Farghan. I didn't know how I would have survived this long without his teaching. Probably wouldn't have survived. Period. They called me a hero, but heroes didn't need this much help.

Valen made a face when he downed the tea – brewed in a beaten-up tin cup provided by Quarra – but he downed it willingly enough. "And now?" he asked, when he was done.

I put the cup aside and settled to my haunches in front of him. "And now, just…" I trailed off. "Just…trust me, okay?"

He offered me a hesitant smile. "That, at least, I can do."

I smiled back, a little tentatively. Just as tentatively, I reached out and placed a hand on his forehead. I'd been trying so hard not to think of touching him that it felt strange to touch him now, almost unreal. His skin was smooth and hot, like he was running a fever, but his eyes were clear and his color was good, so maybe tieflings just ran hotter than normal humans did. _Not important right now. Focus_. I thought of warm summer days spent dozing in a hammock with a cold beer and a soft breeze. I thought of how it felt to sleep curled in the shelter of a spreading oak, the stars twinkling overhead and the night wind murmuring in my ears. I thought of the bliss of sliding into clean sheets after weeks on the road and listening to the wind howl and rain lash the windowpanes. I thought of how good it would feel, just to rest and let go of all of this for a few blissful hours, and let the thought rise up with my power, like breath. "Sleep," I whispered. Most people put up some resistance – I could feel it in the way my command broke over them, like waves over a quay - but Valen was either too tired or too trusting to put up a fight. Maybe it was a bit of both. Almost immediately, his eyes fluttered shut and the lines of exhaustion in his face eased into sleep.

When I was sure he was out, I took my hand away, or tried to. The backs of my knuckles slid down his temple to his cheek. The memory of a red-haired boy lingered in the back of my mind. Had that been a real memory, or just a dream? I thought it must have been real, because I could see traces of the boy in the face of the man in front of me – buried under the weight of years and pain and disappointment, but still there, clinging to those last, precious shreds of innocence like a shipwreck survivor to the flotsam.

Quarra's voice intruded, although her feet hadn't made a sound. "What really happened back there?"

I let my hand fall. "I told you," I said, without looking at her. "We failed. They sent us packing."

The drow crouched in front of me, forcing me to look at her. "Seems to be more to it than that." Her eyes were red and cutting. "There something I should know?"

What we'd just been through was none of her beeswax. "All you need to know is that you'd better make plans to fight illithid forces when the Valsharess comes."

The drow reached for no weapon, but her face suggested that was only because she would have preferred to kill me with her bare hands. "If you let him come to harm…"

Anger flared like a firework. She had no idea what we'd just gone through, how hard I'd fought to get him out of it – how hard _he'd_ fought to get _me_ out. Then, also like a firework, my anger fizzled, because if not for me, Valen wouldn't have had to go through this in the first place. I laughed, bitter and harsh. "If that happens, I'll deserve whatever you do to me," I told Quarra. _Hell, I'd even hold her coat._

"Very well." The scout stood, reaching for her crossbow. "Draw your weapon and keep watch, priestess," she cautioned me. "No sleeping." She nodded at the kobold and the tiefling. "Their lives depend on it."

I looked down at Deekin, and all the fight went out of me – all the fight against Quarra, anyway. My voice went quiet. "I know."

The drow nodded and stalked away, taking up her position by the entrance. She crouched there, and there she stayed, motionless as a statue and only slightly more impatient.

I stood, drew Enserric, and took up position a few paces away, grounding the sword's point on the ground and resting my folded hands on his pommel. I knew I should have felt tired, but I didn't. A cold energy ran through my veins, sluicing away the exhaustion. Shaundakul help me, I welcomed it. It made me feel a little cleaner – a little less like my very veins had been filled with sewage and bile. I stared down at the black-glass hilt between my hands. _That's you, isn't it?_ I asked silently. _You're feeding me energy._

Enserric answered so quickly and quietly, I couldn't tell if the voice was his or mine. _I am._ Forced gaiety colored the sword-spirit's voice. _Never fear, wielder. I am with you._

 _Yeah_. I stared straight ahead, into the shadows. I remembered the warmth of Silent Partner's haft, like a living thing, but the cold energy that beat in time with my heart now was as dead and dreadful as the eye of a hurricane. _That's what I'm afraid of._


End file.
